Sunday, July 29, 2007

USB VIRUSES!!!


Lately there has been a rash of virus attacks in computers around the area. It all started with a friend telling me of something strange going on with his computer. Namely, whenever he tried to open orkut.com, there was a devilish laugh and a window that had a fairly uncomplimentary message. The long and short of it being that opening orkut.com was impossible. The second being another similar window that prevented Mozilla Firefox browser from opening, and thats not all because after advising the user to switch to internet explorer, IE would shut down after a few seconds too. The third virus in the zoo was something called Nhatquanglan (someone in HO Chi Minh city Vietnam). This guy was pretty cool too, it would reproduce itself every time a folder is opened and take up some space. More irritating was the fact that it would disable the task manager and the folder options (ostensibly to prevent the user from shutting of the program). They were apparently being spread by flash drives, and no anti virus program seemed to be able to do anything about it. This necessitated a fairly radical operation in which some software like Hijack This, and reanimator had to be downloaded to clean the laptop up. So far it seems to be holding up. But what I am looking for now is some sort of a vaccine for a USB drive. Giving its overwhelming convenience and yet stupid safety profile, I hope someone somewhere , smarter than us all would get around to doing something about this.
That person would earn my undying gratitude.

On the other hand, I hope good sense prevails and life goes on smoothly.

1 comment:

Diwakar said...

the easy way is to disable autorun in windows.. and never double click on the drive.. rather just type the frive letter in the address bar..

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