Warning from a friend

[queenbee]

The message was as follows - Do not open an attachment called, INVITATION TO FACEBOOK, it is a virus that opens with an Olympic torch that burns the whole hard drive c - This will be sent by someone in your address book. Also a new virus (The worst ever) as announced by Cnn (who ever they are) has been confirmed by Microsoft - it is a Trojan Horse that asks you to install Adobe Flash plug in. When its installed its "ALL OVER" and there is no repair yet. Snope says this Is true, it gives me a hyperlink to snope. No way will I open this!!!! Has anyone heard this or is it just a scam.   

[queenbee]

[pigeonseed]

Why not go to snopes.com (a website collecting and verifying online hoaxes and urban myths) and search for the warning yourself, thus avoiding risk of any links sent to you. You'll find it classifies it as a hoax.

Or if you Google the warning phrases used in the email, you might find people discussing them online.

The Olympic Torch virus is an old hoax, from what I can see, so nothing to worry about and not for forwarding. I try not to forward warnings on to other people until I've checked out that they're authentic, and until now I've never found one that was!  :)

[queenbee]

Thanks pigeonseed, I just needed confirmation of the hoax. I really felt it was and will stop worrying about it. 

[lincsyokel2]

. Also a new virus (The worst ever) as announced by Cnn (who ever they are) has been confirmed by Microsoft - it is a Trojan Horse that asks you to install Adobe Flash plug in. When its installed its "ALL OVER" and there is no repair yet

Ohh no, one of the worst virus in circulation is the Katusha.A.WM32 virus.

I delve round in some very dodgy corner sof teh internet, and as such i have some cosiderable defences set uop against malware. I run

MALWAREBYTES and AVG antivirus/spyware killer simultaneously, because they coexist with intfereing with eahc other, and cover each others holes.
SYSINTERNALS PROCESS EXPLORER rather than WIndows Task Manager, but not replacing it
Startup Inspector to prevent unathorised changes to the boot sequences or the registry entries
Registry Mechanic 6. to monitor and fix registry problems
MS Malicious SOftware Removal Tool

Reserve tools for wiuping out nasty stuff include
SPatmau Powersuite and Boot suite
Macafee Rootkit defender
Firefox No SCript add onn

This more or less keeps me bulletproof from the nasties.

However despite all this, i picked up a live copy of Katusha on opening a torrent file. Despite my defences, it systematicallt destroyed each program i fought backl with, as well as locking out the internet , preventing any browser from going to any site with antimalware conentions, disabled all the defending programs, locked of task manager and porocess explorer, and then set about infect every single  file in windows/system32 and then spread to the boot sectors on each partition and then the Master boot record.

In a little under 20 minutes, despite an heroic fightback, it completely and ruthlessy  trashed the PC,  and irretrievably destroyed the data on both drives and all four partitions. Unbelievable. The only way to get rid of every trace was to boot the bloody pc off a linux disk, format the HDD, then boot off an XP CD and  partition and format it all again, then recover my data off my backup dvd's (you DO back up your data. dont you?)

In 20 years in IT ive never seen a virus like it. But im ready for it if it sticks it head above the parapet again.

The point here is that MOST virus arent this agressive, becaue the object of MOST virurses is to sneak onto your machine undetected and steal your money or data. It is not in the viruses interest, therfore , to trash your machine. Its just that every now and then some sick little korean or russian kid writes a destructive virus with no point other than to trash the PC, but hey are pretty rare.