And so today I spent my morning reading Wikipedia's "list of notable 
computer viruses and worms".

All the big names are there - Byte Bandit, Chynoble, Melissa, Code Red, 
SQL Slammer, Sobig, Sober, MyDoom, MS Blaster, Klez, Nachi, etc. Plus 
there's a few I haven't even heard of. (Obviously most of these are PC 
viruses, and it wasn't until the late 90s that I started using that 
platform.)

In all the time I've been using computers, I have only seen 2 virus 
infections. At uni, I unwhittingly infected a PC with the Happy99 virus. 
[At least, I'm pretty sure that's what it was. As far as I know, nothing 
further came of this incident.]

Later, my laptop became infected with MS Blaster. This is the only time 
a computer that I personally own has become infected with a virus.

I remember being distinctly unimpressed my McAfee's ability to detect 
the virus, yet do absolutely nothing to actually remove it. It just 
whinged "oh dear, the file cannot be deleted, what shall I do?" In the 
end, I had to go delete it myself manually. (IIRC, it was read-only or 
something, and that was all that was stopping it.)

Of course, the machine instantly become reinfected. In the end I 
reinstalled Windows XP. But as soon as I attempted to access the 
Internet to download the patch, the laptop was reinfected and started 
rebooting faster than I could download the patch. In the end, I had to 
use my mum's old PC (Windows 98) to download the patch so I could 
install it.

Melissa, Code Red, SQL Slammer and ILOVEYOU are all legendary names, but 
until today I didn't actually know precisely what they did or how they 
worked. It's interesting how some of these expoit bugs that were fixed 
months ago. Others merely use minimalistic social engineering tricks.

It's surprising how stupid some people are. For example "why did you 
open this attachment 12 times??" "Well I wanted to see what was in it!" 
I guess most people don't realise that clicking on an attachment is what 
infects PCs; they probably think it's something like the common cold 
that "just happens" one day.

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.

Anybody else here have any interesting virus experiences?

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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