How to find a virus?

[Guest]

I believe I have a virus. Yesterday, I received a bounce back message on one of my hotmail accounts. The message that bounced back was not one that I sent. It had attachments that were a .bmp file and a .zip file. How do I find out where the virus is? And once it is found, how do I rid my machine of it?

 

[Guest]

You get an Anti-Virus program. Assuming you do not have one, you can get
one free here:
http://free.grisoft.com/freeweb.php
Once you download and install, and Update the program, scan your computer.
The updating part is very important. Check for updates immediately after
you install and before you scan.

Online Virus Scans
http://housecall.trendmicro.com/
http://security.symantec.com/ssc/home.asp

There are other things out there that can cripple your computer know as
Spyware that your AV program will not find or fix. For those things you
need Anti-Spyware Programs. Here are two free ones:
Ad-aware - http://www.lavasoft.de/ - FAQ, Help & Forum @ Site.
Spybot - http://www.safer-networking.org - FAQ, Help & Forum @ Site.

Online Spyware Scan
http://aumha.org/a/quickfix.htm

SPYWARE INFO-HELPRUL LINKS
http://www.cexx.org/noadware.htm
http://aumha.org/secure.htm
http://mvps.org/winhelp2002/unwanted.htm
http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/

I believe I have a virus. Yesterday, I received a bounce back message on

one of my hotmail accounts. The message that bounced back was not one that
I sent. It had attachments that were a .bmp file and a .zip file. How do I
find out where the virus is? And once it is found, how do I rid my machine
of it?

 

[Juergen Heinzl]

I believe I have a virus. Yesterday, I received a bounce back message

on one of my hotmail accounts. The message that bounced back was not
one that I sent. It had attachments that were a .bmp file and a .zip
file. How do I find out where the virus is? And once it is found, how
do I rid my machine of it?
[-]
Aside from the other reply - your machine may not be infected at all.
The thing is those clowns out there use to use existing or faked
addresses to send viruses / worms.

For instance my email address here is a pure USENET bit bucket address
and about every other day I just delete all the crap and bounced
messages that has arrived there.

In short a virus scanner, I'd avoid on-line scanners as they need
ActiveX and may act as a hole for malware if you're lucky enough, still
is a good idea. Just no need to re-install everything or so if nothing
is to be found.

Stay clean ;-)
Juergen

 

[Guest]

Well, I have Norton Antivirus, and prior to posting my question, I updated the definitions and ran it twice. No virus was found. I did follow your advice on the spyware, and the program found several offending files. Hopefully that was the problem.

Thanks.