h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well, I guess the title says it all. I've been using computers on the internet a long time now - probably about half my life - and pretty much exclusively without any sort of anti-virus protection or firewall. During this time I have downloaded games and game cracks, gotten all sorts of stuff from file-sharing networks, and spent far too much time on IRC. I have never had a computer virus or been hacked.

I don't know anyone in real life who has, although I know some who've claimed to have been and then its turned out that they've just done something to mess up their computer themselves.

I have seen a lot of malware (spyware, adware etc.), but that's easily dealt with by controlling which websites can set cookies.

So, are viruses or hackers (not malware) a genuine threat to home computer users, or just something whipped up to sell virus scanners and firewalls?

My mum always seems to end up with viruses on her computer, but like you I've never had one. I once got a trojan horse, because my idiot boyfriend happened to be sitting at the computer when another 'friend' sent one via ICQ. He accepted it, and he was supposed to be some sort of computer expert! But apart from that, in aroun 8/9 years of being online I've never had anything and I download all sorts of things.

Judging by the amount of virus alerts I keep seeing being spammed everywhere as some stupid clot thinks it's an emergency, it's all panic and hysteria.

Real. Just today had to take off another CoolWeb adware off someones PC and the mail virus checker catches upto 500 a day. The worst is when you do not know you have been compromised and your machine is now part of a zombie network. Until later...
BCNU - Crescent

All the time, in Virus terms, but Norton seems to get em all, and we have had a few trojans, and several hundred bits of spi ware every time we clean it off But they don't relaly seem to cause any trubble, as the Norton and spibot and addaware and such like piks htem up pretty quickly; plus with history kill, it gets rid of the temp files fairly quickly and hence where any nastys are more than likely to be hiding Had an awful trubble though when we had to get rid of New.net off the machine

Something got me about 3 weeks ago, that even with 2 mindwipes and reinstalls has finally shattered my hard drive, it is completely wrecked, (I am using a borrowed drive, while a techie friend tries to fix mine), I run AVG, spybot, ad aware, and sygate firewall, plus my adsl modem firewall.

I thought all this hack stuff couldn't get me, and was a load of hooey, well, I am up for a new hard drive, plus I lost a heap of pictures,I hadn't yet transfered to disc, and the web page I had just begun to design for work, (it didnt only take my main drive, it also corrupted my backup drive)

What did I ever do to anyone to deserve this?

I have been really inconvenienced with this, if it wasn't for my techie friend I would still be without a comp.....and would have no hootoo

so I no longer think this is just hysteria

I think the record our business has in one day is 78 viruses detected by Norton...

Occassionally one does slip through the net (about once every six months).

As for hacking - our proxy logs make interesting reading... 14 separate attempts were made to access our internet server from outside the building in the last week (none of them succeeded - theoretically)

If you have no virus detection, how do you know you don't have a virus? Maybe you are one of the many who have pcs being used as zombies.

My machine was one of the first to get the Sasser worm when it did the rounds on the Durham campus, and I had a morning of trying to sort out a computer that kept on crashing shortly after starting up.

Yes, there are real threats.

Real threat. Both my parents computers have been infected by numerous viruses, but mine never has. I guess if you use the internet knowing about the sorts of things which might give you a virus you're safe enough though. After installing WinXP on my Dad's computer, I hooked it up to the internet to download ZoneAlarm (my first order of priority), and in the 10 mins it took to get it, something had hacked through the WinXP firewall and taken over the computer. Had to start from scratch. D'oh! My mother's computer, which I hadn't set up with virus scanner and firewall, had 3 or 4 different viruses on it by the time I got round to fixing it for her. I think they came through email and webpages. Anyway, with AVG and ZoneAlarm providing fantastic free virus scanner and firewall, there's no reason not to.

Viruses are real. Hijackers have taken over internet explorer several times. One of the users on this computer had his email address hijacked.
One of my colleagues had their email address hijacked by some holiday type company without their knowledge and they were using it for advertising. You said you have had no problems, but are you really sure???? My old computer slowed down dramatically on h2g2, only when I downloaded adaware was the problem solved, loads had downloaded onto my computer without my permission or knowledge. If you have children who use instant messaging you will get loads of viruses. Protection is a necessity.

Hel, how can a virus affect hardware? Can't you just wipe the HDD and reinstall the OS software?

Failing that, buy a Mac (hugely reduced risk of viruses etc).

~~

What's a zombie network?

hi kea

I already wiped and reinstalled twice after the attack, but now the harddrive is full of bad tracks and computers aren't recognising the drive, when it is pluged in, it just comes up as device not operating

When you say wiped do you mean zero all data?

Anyway you have my sympathies. My laptop is on the fast track to hell (sorry about the pun ) and I'm hoping to get a new one before this one reduces me to too.

kea, "zombie pcs" are ones that have been taken over by a hacker and are used to mount attacks on other systems. Apparently there are millions of these. You can't easily tell if your pc has been taken over because they don't take them over to cause you trouble, they use them to cause other people trouble. There is a trade in zombie pcs, hackers will sell access to zombie pcs to criminal organisations and spammers.

Not all viruses, spyware etc do instant obvious damage, so Bouncy, I'd certainly advise checking your PC!

I didn't think I had any nasties until I ran Pest Patrol & Adaware. Norton has picked up several viruses in email. Using zonealarm & switching to Mozilla has certainly helped.

So how do they affect the zombied computer? Do they use up system resources? Or are they stealing IDs? Or ?

Thanks to some advice given on another thread I've just installed Windows SP2 (I'd been putting it off as I'd heard of other people having problems afterwards but so far - touch wood - everything seems to be working okay).

I've also just downloaded and installed Norton to replace my old antivirus (Panda) which was just about up. And I also use Zone Alarm firewall.

When I first used Spybot and Ad-aware (after having had my computer for over a year) I was amazed at how much junk they found in my computer. Ad-aware found almost two hundred dodgy files! Spybot somewhat less. Now I run both of these programmes once a week - and there are always new ones found.

So, no, I don't think it's hype.

az

With a zombie PC you won't notice anything, it will sit there silently doing nothing, occasionally reporting back to the creators that it exists but nothing else.

The the creator of a zombie net will then send out a message to a number of pcs on its net to all attack a certain website. The affect on the individual home pcs is nothing, the collective effect of them being used is organised gangs extorting money from places such as betting sites.

Threating to take them down using a zombie network if they don't pay up.

kea, if they're being used to mount an attack on someone else they'll use up various system resources at that time. There is also the danger that they might install keystroke loggers on your computer to pick up your passwords and credit card numbers if you buy anything online.

Well, on the advice here I just reinstalled the (Mcaffee) virus scanner my university gave me, updated it and did a scan. All clean , so its getting taken straight off again.

Az, the stuff adaware, spybot etc. picks up are not typically viruses. Spyware, adware, malware etc. is a separate issue to traditional virus scanning with only a slight overlap.