got zapped twice already

[Roy Rogers]

got confiker, used killdisk to low level format, and reloaded windows XP. fresh clean load. All seemed well until I plugged in the magicjack phone USB unit, then all went crazy. Be advised peripheral devices can hide the worm. Thank goodness for my Linux machine. Worked two days cleaning up old hard drive and reloading and reconfiguring the XP machine and it was reinfected within an hour. the worm blocked every effort to download a patch. I attempted the microsoft security downloads but was blocked. so far I haven't noticed any problems with my vista machine. Another comment, I reloaded my C drive with about 2 gigs of programs but properties/tools/listed 8 gigs used??? Wonder what the other 6 gigs were.

 

[terii]

You mentioned being blocked from security sites. Did you try putting in the IP address of the site instead of the usual name? I hear that will allow you to connect to the site.

As far as your missing drive space, have you checked System Restore points? A new restore point will be made with installation of every piece of software you installed. Possibly set the system restore levels at a lower level so it does not consume a lot of hard drive space.

 

[Zatharus]

got confiker, used killdisk to low level format, and reloaded windows XP. fresh clean load. All seemed well until I plugged in the magicjack phone USB unit, then all went crazy. Be advised peripheral devices can hide the worm....

Viruses/Malware/Trojans etc. can hide in external storage devices. The MagicJack USB dongle is NOT one. The worm cannot hide in or infect hardware shuch as the MagicJack USB device anymore than it could hide in or infect your monitor or sound card!

There is too much FUD and innacurate information floating around about this worm. Are you certain you even had Confiker in the first place? Download this tool and run it on your machine if you are worried or suspect infection. Your best defense against it is to make sure your Windows installation is up to date with all the patches and security fixes. The exploit that Confiker uses was patched back in October of 2008.

Please do not further the unessesary spread of paranoia.

...Another comment, I reloaded my C drive with about 2 gigs of programs but properties/tools/listed 8 gigs used??? Wonder what the other 6 gigs were.

The OS? Vista takes up a fair bit of space itself.