Hi folks, apparently I caught a Trojan by downloading from the hub last night. The user who "shared" it with me sent me a warning but I did not see it in time. I cleaned my PC and right now I am unable to connect to the hub anyway but everybody who downloaded from me should please check their PC to avoid further spreading. Thanks:-)
Barbara, I hope it is not a big problem for you.
Trojans and virus shouldn't spread in the HUB so easily as we mostly share audio and video files in the HUB. Of course there are some files that could contain a virus: Word files, compressed files and executables but this type of files are minoritary I guess.
Just have a good antivirus software installed... always!
I recommend Panda Antivirus, it has worked wonderfully for me.
Kind regards
I dont want to worry anyone unnecessarily but this type of thing has apparently already started on another file sharing network, namely Kazaa. More details here link
I found 2 trojan horses, one in an mp3 file, one in a *.tiff file and further some in other files
First.. by me they came not from the hub and are not shared
Second... I was very surprised about the trojans, it seems some files are renamed
I doubt if trojans in audio and picture files are effective (because not executeable), but better be careful indeed
Since when have viruses been able to be encrypted into audio and/or video files? I thought file viruses were limited to *.exe, *.com, *.doc, *.xls, and *.scr ... ??
So then in other words, downloading from places like Kazaa is no longer safe? If so, then this is something a whoooooole lot people should be aware of.
"Since when have viruses been able to be encrypted into audio and/or video files? I thought file viruses were limited to *.exe, *.com, *.doc, *.xls, and *.scr ... ??"
Actually, anything can be encrypted into anything. I once used a software called "Camouflage" to encrypt an exe into a JPG file. The result was, of course, a bigger file size, but the picture looked normal so it couldn't be suspected.
You can embed an EXE file or whatever into a TIFF file, but in this way you cannot execute the file normally (what you can do is to "extract" the EXE back using the appropiate software).
I don't know how I caught the trojan and it did not cause much trouble because housecall removed it immediately. Now I have a virus scanner :) I will never understand why so many people find it funny to spread worms and viruses, it's the most useless waste of time I can think of.
I too didn't think it was possible for files such as mp3 to be infected. And if something has the wrong extension it generally just won't open for me.. of course if they add .exe like file.mp3.exe I would immediately notice.
Just to be safe, from now on I'm going to convert downloaded mp3s to wav files before listening :)
And keep in mind that a lot of these things are programmed to duplicate and email themselves.. or these days possibly share themselves without the victim knowing it, so don't instantly hate someone if they send you a bad file, but do let them know.
And these days you simply cannot live without a virus checker. If you can't afford one, there is a free one I use called AVG. I first saw it recommended on TechTV. link