Email Viruses

[meeja]

Over the last couple of days, I've recieved a fair few suspected viruses (You know, attachments like mydate.zip or .scr or .pif files)

Obviously got rid of them immediately, but I have heard about people opening the attachments safely just to see what text appears somewhere in the file.

How do you do this?

Intrigue is getting to me!

[Bodo]

I did this under Linux O/S, and the contents looks binary (of course).

[warmfuzzies]

Or a hex editor, such as ultra edit..........
careful as U go though,

[zumbruk]

meeja said:

Over the last couple of days, I've recieved a fair few suspected viruses (You know, attachments like mydate.zip or .scr or .pif files) Obviously got rid of them immediately, but I have heard about people opening the attachments safely just to see what text appears somewhere in the file. How do you do this? Intrigue is getting to me!

AFAIK, you can't. MyDoom & its friends are Windows executables and can't be "opened" as such. If you wanted to run them, I suggest you do it on a standalone image running on a VMWare machine... Then you can easily trash the infected image.

[simpo two]

Or I suppose you could pull out your phone plug, open the virus, play with it as required then use AV software to remove it before going back on-line...

Don't think I'll bother!

[Mr E]

zumbruk said:

AFAIK, you can't. MyDoom & its friends are Windows executables and can't be "opened" as such.

So? You don't have to execute them just because that's the default action in Windows......

Hex editor will do nicely. Or a debugger, and attempt to reverse engineer the beastie.

Probably not worth the effort. If you want the source, I'm sure it's on the web somewhere.

[robertuk]

in Win-XP

Highlight the file.

You can right click and select open With...

then click Choose Program and select notepad or a text editor.

Best thing to do is bin it though.

[sagalout]

A virus has gotten into my new system and now I can't read Yahoo e mails, my E bay profile etc. Have to go back and start again from scratch. What are the best systems to stop this, the guy who supplied the computer was on about various free stuff on the 'net which you can download like "virusattack" or something similar. Are they any good? He reckons Norton isn't the best anymore.
A. Novice.

[watkid]

sagalout said:

A virus has gotten into my new system and now I can't read Yahoo e mails, my E bay profile etc. Have to go back and start again from scratch. What are the best systems to stop this, the guy who supplied the computer was on about various free stuff on the 'net which you can download like "virusattack" or something similar. Are they any good? He reckons Norton isn't the best anymore. A. Novice.

Try AVG - www.grisoft.com There is a free download on there. We use the Pro V7 and it stops everything

[sagalout]

Thanks very much. Once I get the damn thing back working I go there.
Cheers
Tony H

[sagalout]

GOT IT.
After trying everything we could think of we cleaned out the hard drive and reloaded everything.
Machine back working at full speed etc.
Tried Yahoo e mail and again it won't read mail
Damn Damn damn

Tried a different provider however and BINGO

Now dumped Virgin and gone with Tiscali