My First Trojan

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

(no, not what you think.)

This weekend was a first for me, I got infected with my first Trojan Horse program. Actually it hit a few days ago, but I didn’t really figure it out until yesterday.

Every time I booted up, I got weird error messages, and some strange program would try to run. I thought it was something odd, and thought it might be some kind of spyware thing, but ad-aware didn’t catch it.

Then I realized that the running program was mIRC. Now, I had that loaded on my machine about two years ago, but that was also to OS reinstalls ago, and I was pretty sure it wasn’t on my machine anymore. I also knew that many trojans use mIRC for Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDOS). So that set off a warning bell.

Now, I don’t have any anti-virus software on my machine. Never have, actually, and people will call me an idiot for that, but this is the first virus/trojan I’ve ever been infected with, despite some really horrendous computer usage in my past. So I went to Symantec’s online virus scanner, and sure enough it flagged some files as containing the Irc.Bounce trojan.

By this time I’d figured out that the mIRC it was running was actually called, on my computer, taskmngr, (as opposed to the actual Windows program, taskmgr). Looking at that, I also found a hit on Google for the Irc.Mimic trojan.

So I then downloaded Symantec’s free version of Norton anti-virus and ran it with the latest update (this trojan has been in the wild for over a year.) Nothing. Didn’t find it at all. Bah. So I just looked up on the web what files were associated with this thing and deleted them by hand. Seems to have done the trick.

So there you go. After sixteen years of PC usage I finally got infected by a nasty program (interesting that in the PC world, you get a trojan if you’re unprotected, whereas in the real world, you wear a trojan to prevent this.) I’ve got no idea where it came from, as I haven’t downloaded or installed anything recently that I can remember, and neither me nor my wife have gotten anything suspicious in our (web-based) email.

2

I remember my first Trojan.
Her face could launch a thousand ships.

3

Apparently this one could launch a thousand DDoS attacks.

4

Actually, that was what I thought.:stuck_out_tongue:

Can’t fool me with your tricky, tittilating thread titles!

5

Whipper-snapper. I remember my first. It was 1988 on my Amiga. Someone had put it on the disk with Rocket Ranger I rented from some game rental place.

6

I’ve never had one. Sometimes I think I’m missing out on things, but now I’m not so sure.