virus myth

[sensi]

Has anyone reading this post ever lost an entire network to a virus? or an entire computer? or is this just a myth?

[wera]

Originally Posted by sensi

Has anyone reading this post ever lost an entire network to a virus? or an entire computer? or is this just a myth?

i had a boot sector virus wipe out the omputer did something to the bios wouldent post.............................................. ...............

[vikeor]

if the virus gets spread around the network then i guess its possible...

[Dj-Icer]

Scary and spooky..

[proffit]

last week i had a virus delete some one of my system files and made it so that i could lo longer get into windows... was forced to reinstall every thing.

[The_Shooter]

I had a Virus once called "Nimda". I was having a LAN Party and my computer was infected. It soon spread to a few of the other computers on the network. It basically fills your HD till it crashes. My friend did not get so lucky to be able to back his stuff up. It ate up all his space, he rebooted and was forced to reinstall. Most of us at the LAN ended up reformatting because the virus kept reoccuring. It did not however render my computer useless, just made me reformat due to it filling my HD up so fast. If you delete the files, they doubled in size.

[Jeordiewhite]

I always have a firewall on at lan centers, and leave it on. At some of the larger ones, with a good firewall that has good logging, you tend to see lots of suspicous traffic from viruses. I've seen people who got a popular virus from kazaa get their entire home network infected and taken down, can't remember the virus name, but it was pretty bad.

I've personally never had a virus that caused any damage before it could be contained. Except for once when I had an older computer I was just trying to give it a virus and succeeded. It had changed all the cmos settings to 255, not harming the bios itself and took out windows too.
My firewall and antivirus do a good job of protection. I've tried a number of different antivirus versions and firewalls. Currently symantec antivirus corporate edition and the symantec client security seem to be nice, but I stick with just the corporate edition from symantec. My firewall has some good features too like Non-Signature Based Attack Prevention and Non-Intrusive Protocol Analysis which blocks uknown attacks and monitors and blocks traffic before it ever reachs the application layer. It also blocks some known memory activity that many viruses use and protects applications. Plus it does automatic scanning of my system for vunerabilities for me to fix.
Also it has security for instant messengers and has a few predefined rules like not allowing anyone not in your contact list to contact you and several others, and you can add your own. Some of those messenger viruses for msn are really quite well written as they attack a lot of different antivirus and firewalls and removes them from your system. Had seen a friend having a problem with that and had found the virus removal tool for him.

[OuTpaTienT]

I don't think losing everything on your hard drive due to a reformat is the same as losing everything to a virus. It was your decision to reformat. If the data on your drive was extremely important then there are ways to get to it usually. Very seldom does a virus actually destroy all the data on a drive.

[Geforce]

I agree - but working in a coporate environment, all HTTP traffic is scanned, naturally, and the mail has it's own mailserver for virus checking.

All FTP/Other ports are blocked - but if they WERE enabled, traffic would still be scanned as normal.

I wouldn't like to get a network virus with around 100 users !

Damn, that'd make my week suck.

[beastgreeley]

Depending on your computer skills, I don't think I would be possible for a virus to render anything useless. The less work-around-knowledge you have the more apt you are to say piss on it and start over.