A little virus help please

Soldato
Joined
18 Oct 2002
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4,773
Location
Kent
I downloaded a torrent last night that was supposed to be an xvid of a tv show i used to watch and after extracting the resulting file was a single .rar file an not an avi as i had expected which immediately set my spidey senses tingling.

I tried to scan it with MS Security Essentials but for some reason it wouldn't complete the scan. I scanned it with malware bytes which i reported it as clean so i decided to open the archive (not extract) to see what was inside. The file inside deadwood.avi.exe so instantly knew it was a poor attempt at hiding a virus so i deleted everything.

About 20 seconds later Security Essentials popped up warning me about three risks, all trojans, from the file i just deleted. I clicked 'clean computer' and it reported it as a success.

I'm basically very paranoid when it comes to security which is why i wanted to ask on here if I can safely assume that everything is now OK or if i should perform further checks/tests or just go ahead to reformat to be on the safe side. I would tell you what those trojans were called but for some reason Security Essentials hasn't logged the history.

Thanks.
 
If you didn't execute the .exe, you don't need to worry :) Your AV's are just warning you of what was in the archive/caches, without execution of that file your safe.

And stop downloading dogi tv shows ;)
 
I didn't run the .exe i only opened the .rar archive to see what was it in it which is why i was surprised when SE warned me of trojans.

As for netstat i wouldn't really know what a suspicious connection looks like. Is there any particular rootkit scanner would recommend?
 
You could try rootkit revealer but to be honest you'd probably end up more paranoid if you can't interpret the results. I'd chalk it up as an example of how antivirus has its uses.
 
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