Monday, September 29, 2008

Update on keylogging virus

Fortunately, I was able to successfully clean my laptop of the trojan virus. Upon further inspection, one of the infected files was dated Saturday morning, when I downloaded WOW model viewer from the model viewer site. Now I'm not saying that's how I got it, since it seems the virus is also transmittable from web browsing. So who knows. Apparently I'm a huge noob for using IE vs Firefox.

In the last couple of days, I've learned a lot about the different virus scanners. There are some scanners that won't detect this keylogging virus at all and other scanners that will only detect a couple of infected files. From my minimal experience over the last 3 days, the only virus scanner that seemed to be most complete was Kaspersky.

Please consider taking the time to do a couple of scans to make sure you don't have this virus on your computer. You can do a free online scan with Kaspersky. Don't assume (as I did) that the scanner you have now will catch it. For more info on the virus see here, information on manually deleting the virus see here, a WOW forum where someone else had a similar problem after model viewer see here, and official Blizz link here (repeated link from yesterday).

It boggles my mind that a fictional character in a game could be worth something, so much so that people take the time to create these complex viruses. But with the expansion releasing soon, perhaps there is a higher demand for gold?

2 comments:

  1. What's probably the scariest part is that the viruses/keyloggers aren't actually all that complex. Anyone could make one given enough knowledge of programming/hacking/network security. It's unfortunate that so many see fit to use them, though.

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  2. From my experience the 2009 versions of Kaspersky-products (Anti-Virus and Internet Security) are some of the best anti-virus products around.

    You can test fully functioning versions of both programs for 30 days (available via download from their website, around 30mb). Furthermore, if you own an older version of any of these two then you can update to the new program version without any extra-costs (your subscription remains the same though).

    We had people in our guild having their accounts hacked and so one can only be advised to better be safe than sorry.

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