Re: Virus/hacker question

From: Colonel Sam Flagg, U.S. Army Intelligence (colonel_flagg@NOSOUPFORJ00internetwarzone.org)
Date: 02/24/03 

From: colonel_flagg@NOSOUPFORJ00internetwarzone.org (Colonel Sam Flagg, U.S. Army Intelligence (ret))
Date: Sun, 23 Feb 2003 21:23:37 -0500

In article <3e5b8c3f.26358678@news.ind.sbcglobal.net>,
nurse_ratchett@ameritech.net says...
> I don't know if this is the right place to ask, so if not would you
> please point me in the right direction. A couple of weeks ago, my bank
> called me and said they got a list of debit cards that had been hacked
> and mine was on it. They said it would have been between Feb 3rd-7th.
>

Sorry for your bad luck.

I don't think the above has anything to do with the below.

> On the morning of Feb 8th I turned my computer on to a blue screen,
> error in OE some numbers called from VXD. When I hit enter a fatal
> exception screen came up and when I hit enter again, it would re boot.
> I eventually re-formatted and re-installed everything on my drive (a
> real pain in the ***).

Did you even attempt to start Windows in Safemode and remove drivers
that could be causing the fatal exceptions? Did you write down the fatal
exception that was occuring and try to research it? Did you recently
update Windows through http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com? If so, you
could have tried to remove the update by going into Safemode and
removing the recent update.

Did you recently install any new programs?

Did you have a backup of a good, reliable, working copy of the registry?
Or a good backup of the entire machine?

> Several days ago I downloaded from KaZaa and 2
> of the files were virus (one was Hantaner, the other Surnova), My
> virus scanner got those and deleted them.

I would hope it "got them" before you opened/ran the program.

> My computer has not acted
> right since the blue screen incident. For one thing WMP will not play
> certain files (I have Xvid and Divx on my computer).

Have you set it or any of the other programs as the default for this
type of file? Do you have proper libraries installed, such as DirectX,
etc?

> Also I can't
> download from WMP site the WMP 9.0. When I do download my little box
> for downloading does not show the progress bar, but it does say how
> many Kb or Mb have been downloaded.

What browser are you using? Do you have the latest version? Have you
tried to download through another browser? Does the site require
javascript? ActiveX? Do you allow that to run in your browser? Have you
tried to download it elsewhere?

> I have updated my virus scan and
> ran it several times, but it says no virus.

What virus scan? Have you tried another, in addition to, your virus
scan? I recommend using f-secure or f-prot. Use google.

> What does this sound like?

It's sounds like a K2M problem, or possibly an 1D-10t error.

> Could someone have hacked my computer and messed it up? Do I have a
> virus?

> When I reformatted my drive, would that have got rid of the
> problem?

Depends if the virus was memory resident or was contained in the BIOS or
boot sector.

> Sorry for so many questions, but I don't know what to do.
> TIA,
> Bj
> 

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