[R-390] OT: virus check time

[Barry Hauser]

Al wrote:
> I also received "Snow White" deleted it. Norton also quarantine something
> called "Midgets.scr or W95.hybrids. worm". This was also deleted. Know
> very little about viruses and less on how to handle them. Let the Norton
> AntiVirus handle that.

I don't know if it's wise to let Norton handle everything, though ....

Mostly we've seen lots of the "klez" virus and Norton has been catching it,
and a few others.  The problem with some of these is that they will spread
on a local area network.  About a week ago, one of my people thought that's
what had happened -- someone clicked on something and let the genie out of
the bottle.

Caused all sorts of disruption -- disconnecting PC's from the network,
running virus scans, etc.  They ran a scan on one of the critical servers
and it came up with the warning message that the master boot record had
changed.  It offered three choices, one of which was to ignore, other was to
correct it or something (I wasn't there).  They chose to correct it.
Result:  Drive trashed.  Fortunately, we make frequent backups and have a
spare drive or two ready to install and load up, but it was still a
disruption.

They got the same message on another machine, but chose to ignore.  Nothing
was wrong and the scan came up clean otherwise.

So ... if you get that Master Boot Record warning, think twice about letting
Norton fix it.  First, it might not be broken.  Second ... it may well break
it for you.  At this point, I don't know what caused that warning to come up
and how to deal with it in the future, other than to ignore it first.

Barry