Viruses.....

After playing Secondlife for a month, I having back-up firewalls and stuff.. My Boss/father saw that this computer had virus and stuff .. he was told by 5 tech degree friends that it was form me playing secondlife.. now I had to reinstall the computers op. system to remove them.. which is a long prosess.. I love secondlife and I don't want to remove it.. but what moves thought these computers is too important to let mess up..

I want to find out if there is anyway to stop this... I don't know the names of the viruses, but i trust that my boss/father is telling me the truth.. I have to spilt the op system and have protection up the walsoo..

If there is a way that i can get better protection and have any other person playing Secondlife to watch out and upgrade their firewalls... or get more.. there is no thing as a good 'virus'

Ethen Pow

Install a virus prog, update it, same with firewall, shouldnt be any issue, might also want to install adaware, or any trojan/spyware program.

Highly doubt its SL, more of cookies/precache trojans is my bet.

.

Well one question I have been wanting answered for a long time now is "Who's The Boss?" Apparently it is the OP's dad. Now I can sleep at night.

I've had friends tell me they couldnt use SL because it'd give them viruses. Um, it doesnt! Also just makes them look like total computer illiterates or the kind who eat up what the media feeds 'em about hackers N such.

People thinking SL gives viruses/spyware is really ridiculous.

To receive those you either have to open an infected file OR visit a website that is infected.

Ethan, tell yer dad he's plain wrong. Then flush the cookies for your browser. Run Antivirus software. Several if you can. And use Spyware software like Spybot, A2 or Ad-Aware. Dont open email attachments.

Odds are someone opened an attachment in an email without thinking about it.

The Second Life patcher utilities use a naming convention that is commonly dubbed a trojan by virus tools. This is inaccurate, but something I tried to bring to their attention a few weeks ago.


Basically, if it's detecting something like "1.exe," "2.exe," "3.exe," et cetera as a virus, make sure to double-check the file size. If it's around 20 megs and has the Second Life icon image, it's probably a false positive.


I verified this by checking something called an MD5sum - a convenient set of characters generated from the code in the things. MD5s are commonly what virus scanners use to check files so quickly. The Second Life EXEs, to the best of my knowledge, are clean - but they get picked up on occasion regardless.

Beyond that, I don't know what to tell ya.

And be wary of Tech's when they tell you things. Some of these guys are a bit out of date when it comes to hardware/software. Met one who never heard of Intel's Socket LGA setup. His knowledge of Computers went as far as old Socket 478 and Super Socket 7. Yet he's still working? GEESH!!!!

Would've like to pick his mind just to see how little or how much he knew. I could've prolly stolen his job from him!

5 tech degree friends were wrong, sorry. No particular way to sugar coat that.

my guess is those 5 "tech friends" are drinking buddies who own a computer with AOL on it and don't know they have mail unless AOL tells them.

I think I said that I had virus protection on the computers..

Thx, this will help the next time the boss (my father >) has a problem with SL, now I know why all the computers are lagging like hell... >.>

but then again.....playing on the workfloor....tsk tsk tsk.
If i was your father id have u fired in an instant

Run Hitman Pro 2. In my opinion it's the most effective way of flushing your system of whatever spyware / trojans that are infesting your system. Hitman pro pretty much has every single spyware scanning program bundled up into a nice little automatic scanning package. I scan my system about every 3-4 months, and it's great at terminating viruses and the like.

Also.. here's a few tips.

Firefox, NOT I.E. Intnernet Explorer is teh crap. It's got more holes in it than a block of swiss cheese at a mouse convention. Firefox has Adblock tools that block java applets unless you allow them in. That is EXCEPTIONALLY good especially since some sites have fastclick.net programs, which are pretty much adware systems.

I am a Network Admin I get to be lazy 80% of the day so

I think firefox owns but most of the computers have IE... I have said that to him but he doesn't listen.... oh well.. i will use firefox and update the firewall and stuff on this com and see the others fail because he didn't listen ...check please >.>