How to find out what a particular virus does

[yeehi]

Anti-malware programs can find trojans, root-kits, virus and other things and even remove them for you but I think they are not very informative about what the malware actually does. It would be nice to know what sort of things could have happened to a system that has been infected by a particular virus.

What is a good site for finding out this sort of information? It would be good if it let you know how serious a compromise might have been too.

Thank you!

[squaregoldfish]

The anti-virus companies tend to have good information on all the viruses they know about. McAfee's is here:

http://home.mcafee.com/VirusInfo/

(Note that I'm not recommending them - I just happen to know about that page!)

Steve.

[ajgreeny]

In the days when I had windows to worry about I always just googled the "virus-name symantec", or used any other anti-virus software suite name. There are plenty of databases around with masses of info on just about all of the malware viruses in existence