How’s this for a complete bastard of a virus.

The virus is the W32.Deletemusic (2 guesses what it does). This nasty piece of work spreads to all attached drives, including flash drives and portable media like hard drives and I guess for that matter iPods… anyone know if that last one is right? Not sure what the primary method of delivery is; email or download or what.

Okay so now the real rot sets in, once your system is infected it starts deleting all your .mp3′s! Yikes! Yes the lot, everything. The average computer has over 800 such files for people that are not average this can be drives full of music, kiss all that good-bye! For me this would be a disaster (all be it a temporary one), I have many, many files that are mp3′s that are not music and are related to the show… I don’t want to think about the consequences. But I do have everything backed up, and it is not on removable media alone – I have CD copies!

Symantic is already onto this beast that reared it’s ugly head on August 1st saying that containment and removal is easy. Also adding that damage is “medium”, are you kidding me! Medium! Tell that to the dude with a TB of music…

Apparently disabling any autorun features will help stem the appitite of this gremlin… As the virus creates an autorun file to start itself whenever a user accesses a drive. I would add to that to back up data to a drive that is not permanently connected and switched on, oh and employ your common sense as well.

I have this vision of the individual with about 20 hard drives plugged into their PC and they get this virus… they see what’s happening and start doing the whole panic thing running around pulling cables left right and center! Now that at least that would be somewhat humorous to watch.

Dave

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This entry was posted on Saturday, August 4th, 2007 at 11:04 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.