Alright, not a self-proclaimed virus and hacker expert or anything and the follwing is quite long, so please bare with
Trouble started several months ago I suppose. I believe I have been suffering from a Trojan type virus and one which is P2P based. I am a former user of Kazaa (explain why shortly). Naturally, I frequently download music, music videos, the odd tv show, etc. Since this is my only major source of download, it is the only link I can think of with recent activity, listed in order of occurance:
- Upon opening Kazaa, search and download would occur at random, though I noticed many of my "banned words" from my filter were frequently used as a basis.
- Total downloads would often exceed the supposed maximum set by Kazaa (100). Again, would begin at random and high numbers would naturally slow my computer down.
- This activity made it very difficult to use Kazaa, but had some success pausing all downloads and hunting down those that I actually wanted and then reactivate them. Though, after a time paused downloads would resume.
Biggest problem was all the unwated files that would show up in your shared folder, from porn to obvious viruses and various "false files". Many of these such files would show up outside my shared folder as well placed in an almost random fashion about my hard drive. ( Labeled Warcraft3, Grand theft auto, MS Office, etc)
- Maximum uploads was set at '1', but often many times that would be downloading off of me. Thus whatever was being downloaded, false or not, was passed on (along with the virus I'm sure).
- As this activity did not always happen, Kazaa was a 50/50 reliable source for downloading. This reliability decreased over the months until recently when it became essentially unusable.
- Also in recent months, many very bizarre things would occur during normal computer usage. Wordpad would activate and display jibberish. MSPaint would activate and pictures would be scrawled on it. CD drive would open and close etc.
Until now, the firewall present in our Router is all that was used. Using a PC-cillin 2002 as virus protection (though evaluation ran out a few months ago).
Taking some advice from a web board, I replaced Kazaa with Emule, which apparantly has no known viruses yet. I installed the PC-cillin firewall and set security to high. Kazaa and all associated files were deleted. Ad-Aware 6.0 software was installed and eliminated over 100 processes that were thought to be malicious. I also went ahead with the slow process of checking every folder on my HDD for files which did not belong.
It has been roughly one week since. Computer is running much quicker, emule has offered no trouble to speak of, bizarre happenings have ceased etc.
Thought i'd share the mixed experience with P2P, but also wish to know if there are any other precautions (aside from not using a P2P) I could take to ensure this never happens again; is there a good free Anti-Virus software for example
Sorry about the length!!
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