interesting story about Magistr.B virus & Norton AV

"I've been noticing the increasing number of emails coming in tagged with the Magistr.B virus lately, seeming to be the most frequently passed along bug over the last two or three weeks. Not that I find the prospect of viruses spreading through Outlook unusual.

A few days prior to showing up at Diana's parents for our holiday stay, their PC suddenly quit working, refusing to wake up from sleep mode. I dove into it the other night to see if I could locate the offensive bit of hardware or code, finding that I had to wade through Gator, BonziBuddy and a few other annoying bits of spyware. A dose of AdAware fixed that right up, though.

I was able to reproduce the snafu relating to sleep mode, but something didn't really add up. I pulled the S3 video card that is in the machine, going back to the embedded chipset for the time being, and was able to get the machine to boot into Windows without a problem. I started a defrag of the hard drive just for grins since I was busy working on some other things, coming back in to check on the progress every so often. I found that the monitor was being turned off by the power management features of Windows 98 after 15 minutes, which annoyed me a bit, so I disabled it for the time being.

After the defrag finished, I closed the app and left the PC at the desktop until I could get back to it. A football game caught my interest, so I planted myself in a chair next to the PC, which had now kicked on the Webshots Desktop screensaver. Not my cup of tea, but tolerable. Somewhere around halftime of the game, an Illegal Operation message caught my eye. Explorer was pegged as the culprit. I grabbed the mouse and clicked the Close button with no response, though the mouse cursor moved around normally. AH-HA! A clue!

Putting 8 and 6 together, I had finally arrived at 14. After 15 minutes, the monitor would be put to sleep, then after 30 minutes, the screen saver would kick in. Backwards, yes, but that's beside the point. Once the Illegal Operation error made an appearance, the system was essentially hung tight, so the monitor wouldn't be reawakened, appearing to have something to do with the sleep/suspend functionality. Now that I had the general process down pat, it was on to figure the cause.

I happened to catch that the Norton Antivirus subscription service was set to expire in 29 days, so I wiped that out and downloaded Grisoft AVG instead. After the install, I rebooted and was promptly buried in Magistr.B notifications. At last, we have the final piece of the puzzle. I ran a full system scan and found that some 47 .EXE files were infected. Quite the mess, and I would be severely remiss if I didn't point out that Norton Antivirus was no help whatsoever, even though it was configured to perform automatic updates. For whatever reason, they weren't happening, thus the resulting disaster.

I ended up deleting all of the infected .EXE files after making note of them all, performed an in-place upgrade of Windows 98, then reinstalled Office 2000, which covered most of the items hit by the virus. A nagging crash when printing was the only remaining insect haunting the machine, but an upgrade of IE from 5.0 to 6.0 fixed that right up.

Lovely holiday bug, but at least it wasn't the flu, though I'm sure that will rear its ugly head before the winter has run its course. "


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