help!! !! !! !! !! !! ! virusses

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These little bugs are easy.

If you've not experienced a rootkit / system hook yet, you're in for a real treat.

Sorry? Although some viruses can be poorly written, they generally have no significant bugs in them, otherwise they wouldn't work.


Again, I'm not sure what you mean. System hooks are standard stuff. They are how masses of useful software works. Most modern systems would be unusable without them.

However, you are correct in that a rootkit can be nasty. Mind you, it's always your choice to let one "nest" in your machine. Of course, it may never do anything. In fact, it almost certainly will do nothing to harm your machine. That would be pointless, because it would destroy itself (or alert you to its presence, which should be the same thing.)

Try running avast anti virus, select a boot time scan and select scan all local disks, and have advanced options checked on the drop down menu have delete virus, and allow delete selected, don't bother backing anything up since you may also backup a copy of the virus,

To clarify...

When I said "bug" I meant as in someone might say, "I've caught some kind of bug" when they get a cold. Not like "There's a bug in this software."

Some viruses use system hooks or rootkits to do the same thing a legitimate program would, that is, intercept and modify system services. For example...alter antivirus and spyware programs, or alter windows stuff like regedit and SFC, or hide running processes, so that viruses can do their thing without being detected. That means I'm not letting it sit there by choice, it's hiding itself, and preventing me from doing anything about it.

Guarantee that many people would be surprised by the results if they removed their HDDs and scanned them as slaves on a known clean system. Your AV / antispyware program says everything is OK? Think again.

Yes, most of the time these things cause no obvious malfunction on their own and serve as protectors of a virus. But once you manage to kill the virus, a potential timebomb that WILL kill your system awaits.

That better?

It may not harm your machine, but it could easily harm you. It could send out your passwords, personal information, or keystrokes to a third party. It could hijack for your network connection for sending spam or DoS attacks. There's a lot of bad stuff it can do while keeping the host alive.

I know about TCPIP and UDP ports, but I have no idea what you are talking about here. There is no default port for all data connections on your computer. I've never heard of port 4 or port 1268. The popular ports are 22, 23, 25, 80, 443 etc. And I thought ports happened after the physical layer: Using a net-cable or a wireless connection doesn't imply any specific port.

No, not really. You are confusing terms all the time.

A virus is a program (or script) that runs on you machine, with the express purpose of duplicating itself. That's the only criterion. In the process, it will usually cause problems, as most virus code is extremely badly written. It may further have payloads. They may be timed. Some viruses do utterly nothing but copy themselves.

A rootkit is some software that installs itself on your machine with higher than normal user level access. The criterion for a rootkit is that it permits someone out on the internet to log in to your machine and use it for whatever they like.

Viruses and rootkits are not related. They describe different things.

One payload of a virus might be a rootkit. In this case, I would expect that, as soon as the rootkit was established, that rootkit would clean the carrier virus off your machine.

A rootkit may be employed to send out emails containing viruses.

A rootkit is never a "timebomb". That would describe the payload of a virus that you had not completely cleaned off your system. The external controller of a rootkit might choose, at some time, to log in to your machine and delete all your files - but why would they? I don't feel that quite qualifies for calling it a "timebomb".

A good word that brings these two, and many more, terms together is "malware". I.e. any software that interfers with your machine in a manner detrimental to you, or anyone else.

All the other terms you used are just standard parts of normal software.

(And if you are going to use "bug" in a software context, it will not mean an infection.)

OK. That works. Maybe my terminology is off, perhaps I know but don't fully understand what I'm trying to say...but the message is the same. I know how it goes with the details. S'all good.

Sorry for going to town... my specialist subject, so to speak.

I like to make sure people are afraid to the things that WILL hurt them, rather than just being scared of everything in general. E.g. the completely irrational "fear of cookies".

Nonsense! One could chock on a chocolate chip! I just dont know how ghz it would be..