Not so Layback !! Backdoor virus....

BE CAREFUL, BE VERY CAREFUL !!....

On Friday night at exactly 8:30pm, EVERY FOLDER from 'My Documents' was deleted by a nasty backdoor virus. I managed to retrieve some of the information, but about 50% was corrupted during the retrieval process. I am not sure how long the virus was in there, but it could have been a week, since my last complete virus scan...
At the moment I am still trying to put my hard drive back together, but this will take some time, as around 13Gb's of info was deleted, and some of my recent work that wasn't backed up yet.

There is a lesson in there somewhere, so be very careful ladies and gents.... some nasty stuff out there driven by some nasty people.

I have since purchased a 500Gb external drive in order to do my back-ups and keep them seperate.

Regards,

Unhappy Barry......!! :-(

Barry,

What system, Mac or PC and what version of software?

Also did you use antvirus software to isolate the virus or else you are simply cloning it to your new drives!!

Asher

PC.... unfortunately...!

Hi Asher,

Yeah, I'm using PC with XP Professional OS. I also have the current version of Norton Internet Security....so I'm not sure how it managed to get past that... I did another full scan of the HD prior to installing the hub. I also used Windows Defender as well as Ad-Aware 2007...

Hopefully, I will have it all back soon...

Regards,
Barry.

Hi Barry

Sorry to hear you're having so much trouble, hope you have it sorted soon....

I was going to ask the same question, but Asher did it firs. What sort of OS would permit a virus to come and delete 13Gb's of data?

"There is a lesson in there somewhere" I would say the lesson is not to use a PC for critical work.

I don't understand why the world if full of stories like this and people never get to see who done it. Windows did it the OS was not designed in an intelligent enough way to stop this calamity from happening. It it happened to me I would be looking to migrate to a different OS the next day.

I am sorry to be too direct, and sorry for your lost.

What sort of OS would permit a virus to come and delete 13Gb's of data?

Click to expand...

Well, any operating system!

Just because no one's yet released a Mac/Unix virus doesn't mean it's not possible. In fact there are some very destructive Mac viruses in captivity. If anyone ever takes the trouble to set them free, there will be a great wailing and gnashing of teeth among the smug Mac/Unix community.

At least any sensible PC owner will use top rate AV such as NOD32 and schedule it for a daily scan.

Stuart

Barry, I'm truly sorry about your loss...
However, let me ask you: how do you know it was a virus?
The reason I'm asking: once (in 1997) I lost the content of my entire D: drive. I thought it was a virus, too. Only later I realized that my CEO interrupted my work and I forgot to put a simple "if line is empty then exit" in my own code...
Instead the code decided to start from the root of the drive - and successfully deleted everything...:-(

That is the question...?

Hello Nicolai,

Well, actually I do not know what exactly caused this. It was on going work that I lost, as well as photographs and documents, and whole folders that had been there for months totally were emptied of their contents. I don't think that it was anything I did wrong, other than not pick up what ever it was that caused it. The only thing I found was a Trojan the monitors key strokes, and I do not know whether this was also responsible for the deletion. I have had to change all of my passwords as a result. I am almost back to normal, although I have to think seriously about the way I do things from now on.....

Best Regards,
Barry

StuartRae said:

Well, any operating system!

Just because no one's yet released a Mac/Unix virus doesn't mean it's not possible. In fact there are some very destructive Mac viruses in captivity. If anyone ever takes the trouble to set them free, there will be a great wailing and gnashing of teeth among the smug Mac/Unix community.

At least any sensible PC owner will use top rate AV such as NOD32 and schedule it for a daily scan.

Stuart

Click to expand...

The notion that virus affect much more PC's than Mac because "none ever takes the trouble to set them free," seams to be an error, there are differences in the architecture and design of the two OS (Windows and MacOS) that let the door open or closed respectively. I'm not a computer scientist, so don't know the details, but it is very unlikely that the same people who send PC malware just "forgot" the Mac, or that they have the virus and opted to keep them in captivity.

I have been using Macs for 10 years and never ever use any protection or run programs and have yet to see a virus... (I hope I didn't jinxed it)

Hi Leonardo,

I may have made my point a little strongly Apologies if it came across that way.

When I referred to viruses "in captivity" I meant those developed, mostly by security companies, to demonstrate the possibility of Mac infections.

The architecture of the Mac OS does indeed make it much more difficult to write viruses, so most malware authors have concentrated on the much easier Windows target.

The fact remains however, that the Mac OS does have vulnerabilities and that Mac specific viruses do exist.

This link describes some of them in Chapter 7.

Maybe time to consider some protection?

Regards,

Stuart

I know, and more even after some malware authors may be reading my confession of unsafe computing practices. I imagine that a virus can be made that would pray on any OS, even the human OS gets them (I just got one over the weekend that gave me a fever) so we all have to be prepared to face our mortality.

I wish both you and Barry a speedy recovery from your ailments.

Regards,

Stuart

StuartRae said:

...
When I referred to viruses "in captivity" I meant those developed, mostly by security companies, to demonstrate the possibility of Mac infections.
The architecture of the Mac OS does indeed make it much more difficult to write viruses, so most malware authors have concentrated on the much easier Windows target.
The fact remains however, that the Mac OS does have vulnerabilities and that Mac specific viruses do exist.
...

Click to expand...

+1 what Stuart said...
The difference is that Windows is vulnerable and everybody knows about it, while Mac pretends it's not and everyone in the user camp pretends to believe it.
It all, however, boils down to a pure economics: ROI of creating software for Windows, bening or malign, is higher due to the much broader customer base, availalbe and wide-spread knowledge and a huge variety of high-qualtity development tools.

.......wide-spread knowledge and a huge variety of high-quality development tools.

Click to expand...

Or in some cases not so high quality. It is my belief that many malware writers use a 'virus construction kit' (by virus I include adware, keyloggers, trojans et al.) which allows even the most incompetent to make a functional virus. Quite often these are very poorly written, and instead of sitting quietly in the background carrying out their nefarious tasks, they manifest themselves by slowing down or even crashing the system.

In contrast, writing a virus for the Mac requires much more skill, so Mac viruses are likely to be much better written and may well sit there for months without drawing attention to themselves.

Just my thoughts

Regards,

Stuart (who has struggled for 34 years to write software for UNIX, Windows, ICL mainframes, Atari 800s and many others.)

Bonjour Stuart
I guess you're right as your experience entitles you, but don't you think that another reason is that they are much less Macs to infect than windows machines, therefore less motivating for virus "writers"?

Bonsoir Nicolas,

.........they are much less Macs to infect than windows machines, therefore less motivating for virus "writers"?

Click to expand...

Yes, of course that's one factor in the equation. As Nik said, the return on investment is much higher for the Windows platform, both in terms of ease of development and the size of the user base.

The point I was trying to make is that Mac viruses may be more dangerous than Windows viruses because they're better written and therefore less intrusive and not so easy to detect.

Regards,

Stuart

What I read somewhere is that the MacOS is designed so that it is much more difficult --not impossible-- for the virus to go and install themselves in the host/pray system as opposed to Windows.

I also read that this is the reason why American presidents use Mac computers and so do many lawyers that work with must-not-loose information (vital for their maintaining ownership of their skins).

So, whatever the reason for the low incidence of virus attack on the MacOS, doesn't make you want to be on the republic that has no pandemic instead of the one where everyone is falling ill all the time? At the end if you take in to account the price of all the protection software, the time spent immunizing the system (and re-shooting all the work killed by the plague like -that 13GB- ) it is probably cheaper to get the Mac.

On the other side, the fact that most people use a PC keeps us Mac people safe from malware. That is if the virus creators avoiding the Mac for not being worthy of their efforts theory is true...