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Pastimes : Computer Learning -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: laylow who wrote (41141)	5/9/2004 10:29:16 PM
From: d:oug	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 110653

"...know people [don't have] virus software [and/or] never do the updates, and don't get viruses..." laylow, It might be beneficial if thecow and others on the bandwagon to rattle our personal computers and inflict in us all a fear of the powers of Microsoft to lay waste our ability to use the internet, by allowing evil stuff onto harddrives, be it released Windows software or spaggie coded updates, this parade of them huges floats of The Worm, The Virus, The Trojan Horse are very similiar to the images we all have of those long haired hippies of the 60s wearing white sheets on the New York City street corner of Lost and Hope as they shout in alarming voices "Doom & Gloom", "Sky Is Fall'n", and "The End Is Near". Rumor has it that a man-eating-mad-cow is terrorizing the villagers where tc lives, so this may explain the why and how of such a panic for protection. Myself, my new e-machine with WinXP has been running for a month now with only the Zone Alarm firewall up, and no Microsoft updates and no virus etc protectors, and all is the same as day one. Only difference I can tell is that just maybe those that report hacker problems use Microsoft's e-mail Outlook Express. I'am on AOL dial-up, and have not and will not use Outlook Express, but only receive e-mail via AOL which I have heard screens all mail to a degree that some non-spam and non-hacker mail is sometimes prevented from reaching me, but I keep aware of what incoming mail to expect. There is other avenues hackers can infect a pc other than the e-mail as the vessel, but here I'am clueless but it might be a good topic to explore incase other equal good programs are available to replace those being now used with security risks. Seems like a better route to take than the updates the fix parts of the Windows OS that seem to be never ending buggie. Doug

To: laylow who wrote (41141)	5/10/2004 11:53:15 PM
From: laylow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110653

Update, I guess I spoke too quickly last night my "W32HLLW.Gaobot.gen" trojan showed up again. This thing is a real bear to get rid of. It shows up first in a W2k OS in, C:\WINNT\system32\drivers\etc\hosts. If you go to this file and right click and choose open with notepad you find a long list of every help site you can imagine, Symantec, McAfee, Microsoft, etc. It denies access to these sites, you get this page cannot be displayed. You delete all but the first one 127.0.0.1 local host. This allows you to go to these sites at least until it blocks them again. I finally got to Symantec and downloaded the removal instructions and the removal tool. I ran the tool and it showed it removed it, so I did a complete system scan on both hard drives and found more infection. I ran the tool again and scanned and haven't had a warning or found anything in the scans since around noon today. I was worried about Sasser, and in fact downloaded the instructions and removal tool for it but didn't need it. If it shows up again I know now how to remove it manually, but it involves removing a lot of files, and also checking the registry and deleting all the bad files. Keeping my fingers crossed.