PC infected after only an hour on the 'net

I have my sisters Compact 5100c on my bench, I had just reloaded it with Win ME, The OS came on it from the factory
I installed Symantec antivirus to protect it from infection and mistakenly installed Antivir for win 9x ( I fell asleep at the switch, I did not see Symantec come up so I figured I forgot to install and antivirus program )

They took the PC home, hooked it up and did some online banking, then they played a song and it was downhill from there
The virus name is W32.Licum and it has infected the file in C:\Windows\rundll32.exe
I know this is a crictical file and this virus has got through two virus scanners, My nieces said they never opened any attachments, They delete any unsolicited emails in their hotmail accounts
I told them to drop hotmail since it is so prone to spammers
I was wondering if a hardware firewall would protect them better, ( Linksys WART54G ) Or zone alarm , Plus installing Symantect antivirus client
I live in the same area and have no virus problems, We are both on the same ISP which is a cable Internet service
They have no router firewall, I do
Could they have been infected just browsing the 'Net or were they hacked
It looks like a reload is in order
Thanks all for your help :eek2:

An interesting dilemma..W32.licum is a file infecting worm that normally does not infect Windows ME..but then there are a lot of variants floating around. To answer your other question..yes, a firewall would help protect against this type of thing, as would decent antispyware programs used in conjunction with your antivirus. The last study I saw showed 10-15 minutes connected to the internet and not even surfing was sufficient to infect a pc. Windows updates should have helped to protect against this worm as well..since it is a known quantity.

Well she is dead in the water, I can't even execute programs, I did get over 100 copies of infected files
This thing is nasty, I pulled the drive and replaced it with a faster one, My Nieces will like that
I will zero fill the old drive and put it in one of my legacy systems
Thanks for the quick reply, I am phoning my sister and reccomending the Linksys WRT54G
I may even go and pick it up for her

Yikes :eek2:

It is REALLY hard to get through to kids on the security issue. With the popularity of P2P software, "free" this, and "free" that, they show a consistent lack of judgement online. They may delete any unsolicited email, but I bet if a friend sends them a cool screen saver, they will install it in a heartbeat!

Yes, get a good firewall program installed, put them behind a router, load NAV, Ad-Aware SE, Spybot S&D, and Firefox. But they really need a good course in online security to go with 'em. http://doxdesk.com/parasite/prevention.html is a pretty good place to start.

Indeed it isnt all about P2P although they are terrible.
I seen a lot infected by
"Hey check this out I will send it to you over msn"

According to the SANS-Internet Storm Center, the average survival time for an unprotected, unpatched PC on the Web is 24 minutes. More info can be found here and here.

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Originally Posted by chucko

According to the SANS-Internet Storm Center, the average survival time for an unprotected, unpatched PC on the Web is 24 minutes. More info can be found here and here.

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I will argue with your statement. Please be more specific with your facts.
You should have stated: "the average survival time for an unprotected, unpatched Windows PC on the Web is 24 minutes.
Some of us out here are running Linux distros on our PCs and don't need to really worry about viruses, spyware, or malware. Rootkits yes, but that is easily preventable thanks to the Linux OS.

I had a service call a few months back where a guy was having problems with his pc, and contacted Dell support. - Dell walked him through a system restore over the phone, and helped him to load drivers. - Within 10-15 minutes after getting drivers installed (as soon as he loaded the NIC drivers, he was hot to the internet again), his computer was infested - Dell didn't bother to tell him to make sure he loaded his antivirus before going online, or to run windows updates - what a bunch of fecking tards.

By the time I got there, it was senseless to do anything other than a low-level format and start it all over again.

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Originally Posted by DaveW

I will argue with your statement. Please be more specific with your facts.
You should have stated: "the average survival time for an unprotected, unpatched Windows PC on the Web is 24 minutes.
Some of us out here are running Linux distros on our PCs and don't need to really worry about viruses, spyware, or malware. Rootkits yes, but that is easily preventable thanks to the Linux OS.

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while that may be true at the moment, it is more because there aren't enough Linux users for the mass trojan/hijacker/keylogger writers to worry about. This is an interesting take on the subject from Kapersky labs