How do you contract a computer virus poll.

[John0904]

Reason I am doing this poll is to find out how people get computer viruses.

As long as I have been working with computers, I have only gotten one virus and that was because of my own stupidity.

I had downloaded a screen saver with the extention of .scr
When I ran it, ZoneAlarm popped up asking if this unknown program can have access to the Internet.
Right there and then I knew I was infected.

It had put itself in almost every known startup location that I could think of including changing my win.com file and any other file that I didn't know of.
All I did was clean the startup locations (win.ini and the registry) and reinstalled Windows.

That was years and years ago.
Even now, I rarely run a virus scan on my computer. (Am I asking for trouble or what?) :D

As I read these forums, seems like quite a few people get viruses.
I just want to know how.

Note:
All polls are anonymous so be honest please. ;)

Thank you for your vote!

[iisbob]

Last time i personally got infected by a virus was by sneaker net, and it was a BSR { boot sector virus } where i had stupidly left an infected floppy in a drive at one of my first jobs.

Needless to say i was mortified that i had to debug/reinstall DOS back then and try to explain to my Boss what had happened, as i recall it was the AntiEXE.A virus and we used F-Prot to exteingush it ( not after a lot of hours in the office on my part ! ).


Since then i've had Norton stop ( and delete-i know what a virus is & how they are made so i've no interest in examinig them ) several Email virii from infected people i had in my Email list.

It's a never ending task a work to keep up with people who get infected and then pass it into the network-no matter how many warnings we give them , someone always manages to get infected even through the Anti-virus program ( which they disable because they need to run a program that told them to disable their antivirus so it can run :rolleyes: )

And if they are higher in the work chain than you you have to hold your tongue and do your best to fix these fools PC's after they screwed it up.:mad:


We've been very busy lately with the Klez and it's variants.

To answer your question-i'ds say that today it'd be %100 email for people getting infected, since the average public-and businesses- have so whole heartedly embraced Email and it is fast becoming part of the essential communication backbone of America.

[Steve]

I guess I've gotten viruses by all of the above except for "other" and I've probably got one that way too. I used to get freaked out when my anti virus program went off, halting operation. So I got on this kick of seeing how many I could get and practice clearing them up. It was a lot of work, but I learned. What I learned was...how to reformat and reinstall and that trying to get viruses ends up being alot of work.

I still get one now and again. It's always my own fault. Watch out on IRC. Don't send anyone you don't know a screen shot of C:\>dir. Even if they say they can help you. :rolleyes: That goes for turning on file and printer sharing, too. So what the heck, ya gotta reformat and reinstall every once in a while anyway. ;)

[John0904]

iisbob,

You hit on a good point...networks. I forgot to add that in the poll. :(
Especially in big corporations. I'm sure that most viruses look for open networks and infect those as well.
And on top of that, it probably looks for emails on those networks to send itself to other people. One big mass spamming email. :p

It's a never ending task a work to keep up with people who get infected and then pass it into the network-no matter how many warnings we give them.
And those are the people that thought they would never get a virus. :D

If I have any doubt with an email attachment, I usually email back that person and ask if they actually sent that attachment before I open it.
If I don't know the sender with an attachment, I just delete it without even opening it.


Steve,
What is wrong with sending someone a screen shot of C:\>dir?
Is it any different than any other file?

[Gallaeglagh]

I've never had a serious virus, the few that I got were from websites. Since I've started using 2 browsers with different security settings picking them up from websites hasn't been a problem.

I've had plenty sent to my email addresses but have never been fooled into opening them. Hmmm I wonder what nakedwife.exe is all about? Better knock on wood!

I seldomly have Norton running in the backround but do occasionly. In fact after the yearly reformat it seems to be months before I reinstall Norton AV.

[Flick]

Way, way back in the "old days" I was sent to a safety training course at Clemson. They had developed this new software that would track and make it easy to report safety incidents. The training was 5 days and we "students" were all sent home with 6 disks (5 1/4" floppies). Well, I thought the training was worthless, and the software was worse IMO. I took the disks and locked them in my file cabinet. I just hated the stuff. My boss kept asking me about this new program. He wanted to have it working! Within a week we got word from Clemson to destroy the software because a "virus" was within the program. Heck, this was pre-Internet. The contract was cancelled and no new versions of the software ever came out to my knowledge.

[grannybear]

I have been online since 1993 and have never had trouble with malware. I'm now running a software firewall and antivirus software just in case. Most malware hang out on the undernet sites and IRC, so I stay away unless I'm researching--and then I'm very careful to run AV scans on all system folders.

I write infosec newsletters and articles, so I'll have to stop now--before I launch into a lecture :)

[joea64]

The one time recently that I've been infected with a virus serious enough to require reinstallation of the OS was, as some people may recall, when I was hit with the Chernobyl virus at the end of March. I'm still not exactly sure how that happened, but I suspect it sneaked in through email somehow past NAV's email scanning, or I might have opened an infected attachment in Yahoo! mail.

I would say that better than 90% of all viruses that I see these days come to me via email, they're virtually all variants of the pandemic Klez* series of worms. Fortunately, NAV spots them easily and deletes the infected attachments, and I've gotten experienced enough in detecting a mail that is probably infected with Klez - the email titles tend to be limited to a dozen or so titles that can be memorized - that, using MailWasher (a nifty little application that deletes unwanted mail while it's still on the server before download), I can get rid of infected mail almost literally sight unseen.

-Joe-

[jabarnutcase]

I have to agree with iisbob (and others), concerning email "winning" this pole hands down.
Mr. Klez has been by my house quite a few times. (Of course, I never let him in. :D
It has also run rampant on the network at work.

Some, for reasons unknown, just have to read email and Open attachments that say: "Today is your lucky day- Click here to see what you've won" :D


On a little side note, I'm kind of amazed that there have already been 27 votes in this virus poll in 1 day, but it took a week to gather 34 votes in Charles "avatar business'" poll. Or " sponsorship of site" (28 votes):confused:

Different strokes for different folks I guess!:)

[John0904]

jabarnutcase,

Concerning the votes with other polls, the way I have it set up that the voter can vote for more than one option. Whereas the other polls only had one choice.

So if someone voted for 4 options, that is counted as 4 votes. :p

[jabarnutcase]

Got you John - (Makes sense)

Especially after looking at the "Totals" (Duh):o

Pretty Cool:D

[Steve]

What is wrong with sending someone a screen shot of C:\>dir?

I think this falls into the hacking catagory. A couple of years ago when I was brand new to the internet I thought learning a little about hacking would be fun. I got involved with a guy on IRC who seemed really helpful. He walked me through how to do a screen shot and upload it to a site where he could see it. I think it was at that point that he gained access to my computer. He was a pain in the butt for a real long time, playing jokes and pulling pranks. Some of them I still laugh about. Some were definatly not funny. It wasn't until I learned to reformat that I got rid of him. But about a month later he was back in. I was reformatting about once a month for a while, there. I can't prove it was due to the screen shot, but I always recommend a person not do that. :)