Invisible wrote:

> I've heard legends of boot-block viruses, file infectors and Word macro 
> viruses - but I've never actually met one in real life. With the 
> possible exception of the latter, I would imagine these are all pretty 
> rare now.

Never encountered a boot-block virus. Had a Word document that contained 
a virus at once. Of course, that was averted by the whole "This file has 
a macro in it, do you want to run that macro" dialog. Uhh, no ... I 
wasn't expecting any macros. I met the ILOVEYOU virus. It filled up my 
entire inbox. Oh what fun that was. Of course, I knew the e-mails were 
bogus when one of the first 10 was from the CEO. I downloaded the 
script, and opened it in a text editor, just to see what it contained.

> Anybody else here have any interesting virus experiences?

The most interesting was the Worm that was infecting computers via file 
shares. I had stored a few executables on the network share after 
building them, then ran them (moments after the build completed, about 
the time it took for me to go grab a drink from the fridge) They didn't 
work ... Rebuild and execute again ... Didn't work ... Hmm... Build the 
Debug versions (local to my machine) and they worked flawlessly. Hmmm. 
Suddenly my boss shows up at my cubicle (He was also head of IT at the 
time) says "Don't touch a thing" and yanks the network cord out of the 
back of my machine. He then instructs me to open our virus software, 
download the latest update and do a full system scan. My system had been 
affected by the files I built moments before. All because someone 
attached a dodgy laptop to the LAN and logged in, reconnecting 
themselves to all of the file shares on the server, and infecting every 
single writable executable on the file share. That virus was 
particularly virulent. The writability hole was plugged on the shares I 
used so that devs were the only ones with write privileges, but it would 
appear from time to time (probably from the same individual, I dunno) 
and totally cripple the network.

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