I have somebody I know by IRC and she claims a virus has totally wiped out her harddisk (pictures, music, software),… her W2K system is still running,…
She uses Norton (yuck,…i know,…i do not use it for years now!)
This is how it went (like she claims)
She received an email with dangerous attachement
Norton did what it is supposed to do, and puts it into quarantine
she does a reboot (do not know why)
approx. 5 minutes later she notices everything from her documents,…ect is gone
the lady in question is now in full panic
I do not really understand what happened. Somehow the virus or whatever it was must have been executed in some sort of way,…
Is it possible a virus can wipe out: MP3, JPG, DOC, … at the same time? In less then 5 minutes even if a virus got quarantined,… I doubt it really,…but just want to know for sure,…
I asked her for the name of the virus,…but she claims she cannot find it back,… :
If the malware is not executed it won’t do any harm at all.
Since she claims Norton has put in quarantine right away no harm would have been done.
If she really has lost the files, then either the malware was executed (which I suspect) or something totally else is going on.
Grunger, maybe the files are there and she can’t find, for instance, because the virus avoid Windows Explorer to reach that folder, it have make the files hidden, change assotiation, etc.
But I doubt that Norton Quarentine failed. Could be more than one infection…
It is entirely possible for a virus to delete files (and lots of them in a relatively short time), but to wipe a complete hard drive. I think the lady is exaggerating as windows won’t let you format C: if that is the windows drive. It would however be possible to have windows format another partition or drive.
Browsing whilst logged on as a user with admin privileges can compound that fact because the virus would also have admin privileges and be able to do things not available to a restricted user.
