got a surprise on my pc. really sucks, when you try getting rid of this crap. you can spend hours and then get it off, if even then.
anyone else thinking we should go 'Boondock Saints' on the f*ckers making this stuff? i mean, can't the they get real job, but just have to go annoying most of people using computers.
No, they have real jobs alright. For many of them, this is their job, seeing as how a large portion of trojans are designed to grab sensitive information from victims. If you'd like to stand up to them yourself instead of patching your computer, getting a firewall, and preferably switch to *nix all together, go ahead. But you'll be alone in this battle unless you write a virus yourself and know how they work.
when they would stop, also thousands of other people like programmer for virusscanner etc would also be jobless.
doesn't the antivirus programmer also makes some of the virus out there?
>>4
Well, there's at least one program called "AntiVirus 2009" or something similar that is actually a piece of Russian malware. It poses to be a virus scanner and diagnoses fake infections, then demands a subscription fee to remove them, thus scamming non-technical people out of their credit cards. And if it sets up shop on your computer, get ready to have a lot of fun trying to remove it...
As for the big guys like Symantec, Kaspersky, etc. I have no idea. There's quite enough nasty stuff coming from 3rd world countries that they don't need to, I expect.
First you should realize who benefits from the existence of viruses, and then you can perhaps realize why viruses exist.
>>1
Get a real operating system, and then you won't have these troubles. Heh heh heh.
>>8
you mean like loonax, with it's sudo rm -rf /*?
> sudo rm -rf /*
Password:Not much of a virus since it asks for the root password, is it? Plus, some distributions don't even have sudo (of course they do have other means of logging in as root).
Even better, get an OS hosted in a VM. Keep personal files in another hard drive which is mounted read-only by the OS in the VM (but read/write by your primary OS). Save its state and load it every time you boot it. With such a setup you can't possibly have any viruses, but you could still be a victim of credit-card fraud, for instance. Your data isn't much safer, but your installation certainly is. I won't get into much depth but it's worth to try it if you're interested in running Windows XP or something without getting any viruses.
>>11
You're right, it'd ask for a user password and probably wouldn't run that. Some 'rm' utilities don't allow you to do that at all. But it doesn't really change what I've said.
>>12
you probably can't even find one rm that doesn't allow rm -rf /*.
note the *, it's important. refusing to remove /, ., or .. is acceptable, otherwise rm must attempt to remove anything you ask it to remove.