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Worms from SecondLife??
Lilly Sillanpaa
Registered User
Join date: 22 Nov 2005
Posts: 5
12-10-2005 15:30
And not the kind you can just take a few pills for a week to get rid of!

I am new to Second Life and naive about a lot of things on there, so could someone tell me if it is possible for my computer to get infected through SL?

I've recently upgraded to XP, and it was a clean install so I know the worm I got was from recent activity. The worm was W32.Spybot.Worm, and Symantec says that worm is acquired through Kazaa and mIRC, neither of which I use. So I was wondering if the chat of SL was somehow similar to mIRC, and if so, are there any steps I can take to better protect my system while still enjoying SL?

FYI, I am using virus protection and a firewall, and it still got through somehow.

Thanks for any help on this

Lilly Sillanpaa

EDIT: Please note that I'm not saying that I DID get the worm through SL, but I'm just wondering if it is possible for me to have gotten it through SL and if so, how to better protect myself. Thanks.
Aliasi Stonebender
Return of Catbread
Join date: 30 Jan 2005
Posts: 1,858
12-10-2005 16:41
From: Lilly Sillanpaa
And not the kind you can just take a few pills for a week to get rid of!

I am new to Second Life and naive about a lot of things on there, so could someone tell me if it is possible for my computer to get infected through SL?

I've recently upgraded to XP, and it was a clean install so I know the worm I got was from recent activity. The worm was W32.Spybot.Worm, and Symantec says that worm is acquired through Kazaa and mIRC, neither of which I use. So I was wondering if the chat of SL was somehow similar to mIRC, and if so, are there any steps I can take to better protect my system while still enjoying SL?


the reason it's possible to get it through mIRC (more properly, IRC - mIRC is a specific client for the IRC service that is very popular) is mIRC has many advanced scripting and download functions.

SL's chat is just that - chat. Even the in-world scripting only affects things in-world, it's pretty much a sealed box.

However, if you use Internet Explorer, there's still a ton of security holes in it. Switch to Opera or Firefox or something ASAP, or at least disable ActiveX and Javascript and such in IE.
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Lilly Sillanpaa
Registered User
Join date: 22 Nov 2005
Posts: 5
12-10-2005 17:18
Thank you very much for your response! I've now got Firefox, and I feel a lot more secure about SL.

Thanks again!