Virus Lore

[SturmteK]

Hello Friends.
This post is all about viruses.
I am a little curius about how most trojans and other viruses can get inside your computer. I noticed that kazzaa has a lot of them, I dont use it, but I read that 60% of kazaa`s .exe files have virus codes. I was wondering what other ways can you catch a virus though the internet. Can they get though by internet temp files or other misc internet sources without acually downloading the .exe and opening the file?
Once, after reformatting, I was treated to a virus alert by Norton. I havent even downloaded a thing, and somehow, in 2 days I cought one.
Any help will be of help.

Thanks

 

[StormBringer]

Well, there are several ways virii can get on your system. The most well known way is of course through email attachments and other files which may be infected. Another way is through your browser. Some scripts can contain malicious code and can get in through a website(more times than not, these are false alarms, but better safe than sorry)

As for Kazaa and the number of infected files on its networks, well, I'm not sure as to the accuracy of that because I've seen "reports" stating anything from 50%-90% but I'd suspect a lot of that is hype perpetrated by the RIAA and MPAA to try and scare people away from using it to download music and movies. While I've seen lots of corrupted and misleading files on Kazaa and other p2p networks, I've never downloaded an infected file, though I haven't used kazaa in quite some time so...

 

[Goalie]

I've noticed lately when I look for crack/keygens/etc for friends, the zip files will contain either start.exe, or the crack itself will contain the malicious code. Knowing how many people out there use these (amazingly enough, many of these people also buy legit software..) I'm sure this is a contributing factor. I get my cracks through the most obvious sources, which I imagine others do too.. (hrm, fancy common logic)

However, wise man say keep AV on your machine and save to your HD, scan files before running them. This saves a lot of trouble.