BugBear warning
 

Tonight my McAfee Virus Scan intercepted a BugBear virus attached to a message from a PPRuNer who has not contacted me since I organised the Ash Bash in 2000 . Luckily I was warned to get rid of the message before attempting to open the attachment.

I will contact the PPRuNer whose message was zapped by the virus but thought I'd better warn others to update their virus checkers. Having been severely zapped by a virus last year I now update McAfee every week...

cheers

SS

It looks like this one's been doing the rounds for the last few weeks - I've had Norton intercept it 3 times in 2 weeks so it's pretty widespread!

Recommend Norton AV 2003 - it updates itself every time you go online, with no input from you. No chance of forgetting, or not bothering, to update. It also automatically scans all outgoing e-mail so you don't spoil someone else's day!

I believe McAfee Virus Scan Online checks for update when the user goes online without any intervention from the him/her. Mine does, anyway. I think I paid USD 29.95 per annum for the service or something like that.

Another thing I found useful was to select "Do not allow attachments to be saved or opened that could potentially be a virus" in Outlook Express. I don't know how much safer this will make things, but at least it gives me some added security. To those knowledgeable on the matter, how much safer does ticking this box make?

Birdstrike, all that does in OE is disable ALL attachments with a particular file extension (.exe .bat .scr and so on). It does not actually scan them - only AVS will do that. Yes it stops viruses provided they come in one of the predefined (by OE) file types, but it also disables genuine attachments of that type should you be expecting any.

Came home in the early hours after a UK-YYC and back to find 6 of the little $ods infesting my inbox. Fortunately Norton quarantined them OK.

What I noticed was that they were all aviation-associated. So someone has got this in via PPRuNE, I reckon.

So as well as rubbish spam and other unsolicited e-mails, it seems that now there's this cr@p as well......

I run "Mailwasher" (a piece of freeware) which first identified an e-mail as a virus, it was on board an e-mail which was about "Shockwave" when I tried to bounce it back, an error message similar to "This domain does not exist mail returned" Norton also warned me and put a name to the beast.

Bugbear...
 

Bugbear is particularly nasty, as it contains a keystroke monitor, which it uses to log everything that you type to disk and subsequently email them to various addresses. This can (potentially) pass on all your password, credit card details, etc., so anybody who has been infected by this virus should probably assuem that all the passwords that they have used have been compromised and should be changed. Likewise for credit card, bank account details, etc. :mad:.

To protect against this, and other "Trojan Hoirses" you might want to consider installing a "firewall" product, as well as an anti-virus product. This analyzes connections both to and from your system. This will enable you to spot unusual or unexpected connections from your computer. It's quite entertaining (and frightening) to watch all those "innocent" programs going onto the net to lookf for updates, etc. :rolleyes:

I've had good experiences with TinySoftware's produtcs in the past, which used to be free for personal use, but I see that now they are commercial only (see this thread) for more information.

Could someone explain to me how I was infected by this virus? Using w98, Mcafee av is right up to date and warned me the virus was in an e-mail attachment so I chose the delete option. All over thought I, not so. McAfee was now frozen but everything else was OK. In the end I downloaded a Mcafee stinger which removed the bug and now all is OK. How could this happen and what is this I hear about a problem that has long been known about OE and attachments to e-mails?

You know, I'm just waiting for the day to arrive where a person who doesn't have adequate av software installed is comitting a criminal offence.

I shake my head in wonder.

And by the by; it all very good and well to have great av software, but it's virtually rendered USELESS unless it's kept maintained... ie UPDATE IT!!!
To update your av software 2 or 3 times a week will never do any harm.

And gee, if all else fails, DONT OPEN ATTACHMENTS UNLESS YOU ARE SPECIFICALLY EXPECTING THEM!!!!
At the end of the day, is the joke that was sent to you, really worth it that much?
And hey, if you ARE expecting emails with attachments from a regular source, and on a regular basis, then hey, ASK that source if they adequately protected.

Seems like a bit of stuffing around, but I can tell you, after 4 years of owning this particular laptop, equipped only with ZoneAlarm & Norton as firewall and anti-virus, I've not once been infected by any form of virus.


It's high time that individual users started to take responsability for their machines.


No offence intended to anyone here, it's merely me making a statement

;)


GoGirl