On Thursday, during my Internet Appliances lab, it was brought to the lecturer, a Mr Shankarappa Kumbar’s attention that multiple computers in the lab were infected with a virus, W32.OlderData, the lecturer’s response was simple “never mind”.
While such a task might not be his responsibility, but for a lecturer, especially one in more or less, the IT sector, to just shrug off such an alert, it is largely irresponsible and ignorant on his part and it prompts one to question his competency, among various other acts of his which I would not disclose here. However, some part of the fault also lies on me.
Out of necessity of needing to get my work done, or pure stupidity, and since the copy of Symantec antivirus on the particular system I was on wasn’t beeping with alarm unlike the others, I inserted my thumb drive into to the system to copy over some files where I had done previous at come to continue development. Big mistake. The virus passed itself onto my thumb drive, which then ultimately ended up infecting my machines back home.
All of the infected computers were Windows systems running Symantec AntiVirus, viruses def as of 22/11/06. The virus was able to replicate and elude detection until an instance of it executed, which SAV then attempted to halt it. This meant that as long as the virus didn’t attempt to meddle with system configs, it wouldn’t be detected.
Only when I became curious of that consistent floppy seek every now and then did I became curious and launch and investigation to the cause of it. As of the time this post was written, I’ve managed to stamp out all the instances I could find using scans from both Trendmicro Housecall and SAV, along with manually removing registry entries calling for the virus.
