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Viral possiblities
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 Re: Viral possiblities
Posted by Orpheus on Fri Oct 14th at 10:16pm 2011

Question. Has anyone heard of any new virus's out there that do some of the following..

1)I get periodic messages that my hard drive is crashing and needs to be backed up ASAP.

2)I get issues where when we are playing one game, it will go to desktop for a second, then pop up a completely different game already in progress.

I have checked for malware. No errors reported at all. I am about to run some virus scans but...

I have never seen anything like this before. Any incites would be appreciated.



The best things in life, aren't things.



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 Re: Viral possiblities
Posted by omegaslayer on Sat Oct 15th at 12:55am 2011

Sceen cap the message about your hard drive. I know theres a virus ("ransomware" is what the journalists call it) out there that pops up that your hard drive is about to crash or like 50% of your HDD has bad sectors.



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 Re: Viral possiblities
Posted by Orpheus on Sat Oct 15th at 10:01am 2011

I'll have to do it when I get back. Am bout to leave to Pennsylvania.



The best things in life, aren't things.



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 Re: Viral possiblities
Posted by omegaslayer on Sat Oct 15th at 7:11pm 2011

Quoting Orpheus
I'll have to do it when I get back. Am bout to leave to Pennsylvania.

does it look like this:

or this:


Either one is a virus. However if its this telling you you have a bad disk:

then you should pay attention


Posting And You



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 Re: Viral possiblities
Posted by Orpheus on Sun Oct 16th at 1:07am 2011

Actually, it doesn't look like any of those. But here again, the laptop is at home and I am not so it will be a bit before I can post anything screenshot wise.



The best things in life, aren't things.



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 Re: Viral possiblities
Posted by Orpheus on Thu Oct 20th at 10:28am 2011

Well. Somethings amiss with the image tags. I guess you're stuck with a link. Sorry

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/847/diskc.jpg/

I am nearly certain its a virus of some kind as I have since talked to 2 people with the same issues. smiley



The best things in life, aren't things.



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 Re: Viral possiblities
Posted by omegaslayer on Thu Oct 20th at 2:07pm 2011

Hey orph, that looks legit to me TBH. I did some online searches and it seems that what your seeing is legitimately windows telling you your drive is failing. The two pictures I posted above are viruses 100%, but thats not what you're seeing. You can verify this by doing a check-disk on the hard drive on next boot up:

Go to My Computer, right click your C: Drive, and under tools select check disk, and check both boxes. Your computer will need to restart to run it. Check-Disk will run, and I suggest you look at the text it outputs. Any mention of bad blocks, or error blocks, or orphan files will confirm that indeed your drive is starting to fail.

Either way your going to need a new hard drive. You can purchase a new one off of newegg relatively cheaply. Then re-install windows with the key on the side of your computer. As for transfers you can grab something like this to transfer data off your old hard drive to the new install.

Or take it to your computer repair shop, and ask them to clone your drive (make sure they have the program Acronis, or Ghost) to a new one. Theres nothing really stopping you from cloning yourself, you just need a computer than can see both drives at the same time, and laptops (most of them anyways) don't have that. But Desktops do, and any respectable computer rapir shop should have a simple test machine to do the clone, as well as a program to get it done (Ghost 2003 or Acronis boot CDs are all you need).


Posting And You



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 Re: Viral possiblities
Posted by omegaslayer on Thu Oct 20th at 2:13pm 2011

Just FYI I'll be offline form this Afternoon to Sunday. I'll be attending Blizzcon. Crono knows his stuff to, im sure he'd be able to help you with your Harddrive woes.


Posting And You



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 Re: Viral possiblities
Posted by Orpheus on Thu Oct 20th at 9:02pm 2011

You was right Omega. The drive crashed completely today. I already bought another one and its back up again.

I had originally thought it to be a virus, even though I was really careful this time but as I was wiping the laptop, the install disks kept telling me the drive was failing too.

Finally it crashed completely.

My thanks bud. I am just glad its solved. I am out 60 bucks but it makes me feel better knowing.



The best things in life, aren't things.



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 Re: Viral possiblities
Posted by Orpheus on Mon Oct 24th at 2:19pm 2011

Ok now. Please read this slowly because its important no mix ups happen.
It seems I resolved the issue with my wife's laptop. I ran every virus scan with nothing reported. I ran malware bytes. Nothing there either. I ran superantispyware. Nothing but a few tracking cookies.

So I replaced the hard drive. It SEEMS end of story, right?

Ok, now my laptop. I turned it on Saturday morning before I left and low and behold a very familiar message pops up that the hard drive in my laptop is going out too?

What are the odds of two totally different laptops having a hard derive crash within days of each other? When I get home I am gonna run all my tests on it too so up to this point I am not sure about a virus or a malware attack.

So here I am asking questions...

  • The only things I did was transfer my pictures (JPG's) from my wife's laptop to mine.
  • I transfered my audiobooks (MP3's)
  • and our record of our family tree program.
    I only transfered these three types of files. Lets assume the scans missed something. Can a virus attach itself to these files? Can a virus attach itself to a USB thumb drive?

    I am out of date a bit but virus's couldn't before so I assumed they still couldn't.

    I know I need to run my scans when I get back but any info you you guys can pass on would be helpful.

    I have been very very cautious since the last malware attack and am pretty sure I have nothing.

    Thanx in advance.
    Orph



    • The best things in life, aren't things.



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     Re: Viral possiblities
    Posted by sgtfly on Mon Oct 24th at 9:34pm 2011

    I'm 99.9% positive you can't get a bug from jpg's or mp3's, you may have gotten something through the family tree program if you downloaded something from there but it's highly unlikely.
    Looks like extremely bad luck there dude, but I'd say your drive is due for the grave yard soon also.
    If you bought both comps of the same type near the same time it was probably a bad batch of drives. smiley


    Light is faster than sound:That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

    Your riches in life are family and friends, everything else is just a distraction.



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     Re: Viral possiblities
    Posted by Orpheus on Mon Oct 24th at 9:48pm 2011

    My wife's laptop is a Toshiba and it was bought last December. Mine is an Acer, bought approximately 3 years ago.

    Her's has a 320 gig and mine... a 125 gig I think.

    Anywho's, I will run my scans when I get home but I don't want to transfer any virus AGAIN, assuming it is a virus.

    Is there any foolproof way to virus scan these days?



    The best things in life, aren't things.



    Quote
     Re: Viral possiblities
    Posted by omegaslayer on Tue Oct 25th at 1:12am 2011

    Quoting Orpheus


    Is there any foolproof way to virus scan these days?


    The fool proof way is to take the hard drive out of the computer, plug it into another system computer via a cable such as this, and scan the hard drive with a virus scan tool. Taking the potentially infected OS out of the equation is ideal.

    From what you told me on the phone orph it sounds like you just had two bad runs of hard drives. Total coincidence. When a hard drive fails/gets bad sectors/blocks its random. You'll never know. But Western Digital and Seagate drives are the best bet.

    Also here is that tool I mentioned over the phone, but was cut off:

    http://www.hirensbootcd.org/download/

    Download it, and burn it to a CD. Then you can boot to the CD in a DOS like environment, and follow the simple menus through the different DOS tools. See you can't test a hard drive thats running the OS. Thats why you'll need to get Hirens Boot CD to run seatools (the hard drive program I told you about on Hiren's Boot CD) and check if your hard drive is going bad.


    Posting And You



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     Re: Viral possiblities
    Posted by Orpheus on Tue Oct 25th at 2:15am 2011

    Thanx bud. I surely will look into this when I get home. I have been stuck in Reno all freakin day and am still here. *sighs*
    All part of my job but one of the annoying parts. I wonder what the odds would be of me getting stuck here when I WANT TOO? smiley



    The best things in life, aren't things.



    Quote
     Re: Viral possiblities
    Posted by Crono on Tue Oct 25th at 9:55am 2011

    Quoting sgtfly
    I'm 99.9% positive you can't get a bug from jpg's or mp3's, you may have gotten something through the family tree program if you downloaded something from there but it's highly unlikely.
    Looks like extremely bad luck there dude, but I'd say your drive is due for the grave yard soon also.
    If you bought both comps of the same type near the same time it was probably a bad batch of drives. smiley


    Sadly, you can in fact encode malicious code into any container file.

    As long as it appears to be the type of data the program expects (i.e. an image) it'll open it and attempt to process it ... loading the data into memory. If your goal is to compromise the system in someway, it's not far fetched to do it that way.

    This HDD business is a strong case for warranties. Obviously, drives that are supplied with a laptop don't have these, but the replacement ones you buy do. Make sure they're warranted for many years. And keep in mind that you can clone partitions and all that jazz using any computer with SATA support.


    Blame it on Microsoft, God does.



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     Re: Viral possiblities
    Posted by sgtfly on Tue Oct 25th at 11:49am 2011

    I believe the file extension has to be some kind of executable in order to be made malicious. You would need to download some extension file or such with a jpeg or mp3 for this to happen.
    Mp3's and jpg's are not data file's per se so you can't write any other code to them, they would then be rendered unusable.
    Programs only sees certain extensions as executables.

    This is from my understanding, could be wrong I suppose.

    Anyway I think his bad luck is just bad drives. Doesn't SMART on the HDD usually cause this message, I thought I read that at sometime somewhere. It's hardcoded in the HDD to give you advanced warning for a drive that's going bad.


    Light is faster than sound:That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

    Your riches in life are family and friends, everything else is just a distraction.



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     Re: Viral possiblities
    Posted by mazemaster on Tue Oct 25th at 3:59pm 2011

    especially hot weather could have caused both drives to fail at the same time.


    http://maze5.net



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     Re: Viral possiblities
    Posted by Orpheus on Tue Oct 25th at 7:21pm 2011

    Its not been that hot of late but its a thought..
    So here we are. On the one hand I would have peace of mind if it were hardware crashing BUT it will cost me money to fix. At least I would know I didn't get a virus.

    On the other hand, I have a virus of unknown content and it is crashing my hardware. But a virus is one format away from nonexistance.

    So we are left with, if there is a virus, can it hop onto a usb drive and be transfered ON ITS OWN?
    I mean, if I back up my pictures and MP3's will I get the same bug on my new system install?

    I am still just fishing for info here guys since I am not home yet.



    The best things in life, aren't things.



    Quote
     Re: Viral possiblities
    Posted by sgtfly on Tue Oct 25th at 10:39pm 2011

    If you didn't dl any pics or mp3's lately it can't be those. Try dl'ing and running seagate's hd diagnostic tools, I think they work on any drive.
    I would suggest the dos version, harder to use but more thorough.
    That should let you know if the drive is really failing. Pay attention especially to the SMART tools.
    This checks the drive itself and has nothing to do with whats on the drive so you can trust the results.
    What OS are you using? This seems to be a problem mostly with Vista and Win7, there are a aton of these reports out there.


    Light is faster than sound:That is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

    Your riches in life are family and friends, everything else is just a distraction.



    Quote
     Re: Viral possiblities
    Posted by Orpheus on Tue Oct 25th at 10:49pm 2011

    See here's the thing about me and PC's. I always view them as disposable. That way I am not to torn up when one breaks. What I don't like is things unexplained, or unexplainable. I don't mean like someone not comprehending a situation. I mean like not knowing when or how something went awry.

    With this in mind, all I ever care about preserving on any pc are things I cannot generally replace. IE, pictures from my runs and audiobooks. As for games, I buy all my games so putting them back in is as easy as it was the first time. All I am losing is time.

    That said, I never worry when all I gotta do is format and reinstall windows.

    All that ever causes me concern is like I said, not knowing a thing. So, if or when I have to buy a new HDD all I care about is not reinfecting one.
    But judging by the general consensus here I cannot get a virus from my own JPG's or MP3's.

    At least till I get home, all this is moot till I run the scans.
    Thanx again guys.. You're the best. smiley



    The best things in life, aren't things.




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