The Virus that ate my XP….

Well it has come to a situation for me that I cant possibly do anything without Windows XP. I have numerous USB devices and I simply cannot hunt for their drivers all the time. Migration to Linux completely looks a distant mirage and hence XP is my only solace….
I finally got my hands on an Age of Mythology CD, which I had been longing for, only to find that I had no means to crack it. I had to find both a crack and a key and so did the most natural thing ie. googled for it. Not meeting with success I decided to get it off Limewire (a P2p program like numerous others which connects to the Gnutella network). Being rather confident of my antivirus and backing it to detect any viruses posing as a crack to game, I downloaded a couple of “supposed” cracks. A lot of them were viruses and my AVG latched onto them. My Avg was the latest with all the latest upgrades.

Out of the many, one was undetected by the Avg. The icon looked like a setup file. Upon clicking it, it gave a dialog box saying that some error has happened.

That looked very odd and out of place. Immediately I noticed my comp slowing down a lot. I saw six Question mark signs (“?”) at the right of the date displayed on my desktop. Also there was no “turn off” button any more. The Alt+f4 short cut gave some crap along the lines of “Restrictions: Due to the restriction imposed on this computer the following operation is not permitted, please contact the system administrator” – I was the bloody system admin!. Well I just turned the damn comp off. Now I went to my second OS – Good Ole 98. The virus had infected my 98 as well leaving me Windowless.

As usual I ran helter-skelter got all the required CD’s, took my hard disk and got it formatted etc. Upon loading a fresh 98 and XP( Xp takes a good bloody one and a half hour) I was very happy and content of having gotten the better of the virus.

Now I have a folder where I keep the setup of all the frequently required utilities. So I started my brand new virus free XP and tried to install my firewall zone alarm. Loo and behold the bloody question mark virus had duplicated itself as the setup of all my utilities.

Again I began the arduous task of formatting my XP and reinstalling it.

The question mark virus had only changed my setup files but the other exe files were safe.

As a Comp Sci guy in a weird way I do give my hats off to the designer of the virus. I really wonder what that guy could actually accomplish if he would put his mind to good use.