On Wednesday, July 24, 2002, John Sessoms wrote in <[EMAIL PROTECTED]">mid:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
> For those with an open mind, I will detail what has happened. [...] John, I'm glad you wrote this time with an email address. There are several aspects to your situation. First, regardless of the sequence of events or the way it appears, Beonex just simply does not come bundled with a known Trojan. Think about it. No one else on this list has heard of a similar situation occurring, at least no one contributing to this thread.... But, yes, it does seem as though something got in during the same period of time. I don't know your system, but my guess would be that your DSL and firewall are not configured tightly enough. DSL can, depending on the architecture, permit cross-subscriber disk access. Zone Alarm is a popular firewall; but, well, I think a lot of people who share your enthusiasm for dancing paper clips have the same enthusiasm for Zone Alarm. You didn't mention whether you have a rollback program like ConfigSafe or an image backup like Norton Ghost. If you don't, you should. I have both, and they have each in their way saved me many times. They are in addition to, not instead of, regular off-site backups of data files. And while we're on the subject of what you should be doing, updating your virus definition files weekly isn't even close to often enough. A new variant whips around the country this morning; you read about it tonight or tomorrow; and you'll still be waiting for another few days before the update?? So if you can, uninstall Beonex by Add/Remove Programs, manually removing the directory, and RegClean or similar program. With the most recent updates, clean your file with Norton AV and Ad-Aware (if you haven't updated to Ad-Aware 5.83 and the most recent reference file, do that first). If you can possible roll back your configuration to an earlier set, e.g., with ConfigSafe, do so. If you need to restore an image from an earlier time, do so and then just restore your data files from your backups as necessary. As for what browser to use, there are a lot out there. Some work better than others. Beonex in my view works outstandingly well. It's quick and safe and smart. But if it's not for you, then try something different. And if none of this works and your system is still screwed up, sounds like a good time to move to Linux.... -- JN
