New PC supervirus running rampant

Darius Chang | Oct 04, 2007

According to a tipoff by one of our readers, there is a new bad boy in town and the sheriffs are doing nothing about it. It seems the U.Z.A. O/S virus has been infecting computers at will while keeping under the radar of most antivirus programs (we have contacted Symantec and McAfee regarding this claim and are awaiting a response).

So how deadly is it? We did a Google and found surprisingly little. A few blogs reported that the virus locks users out of administrative features on their PCs, while replacing the wallpaper and time/date system tray entry with U.Z.A. O/S characters. Its primary method of transmission seems to be via USB flash drives (which makes a great argument for the need to protect your ports).

Though antivirus applications seem impotent against this threat, fortunately there is a downloadable utility which works against the U.Z.A. O/S threat. So remember, boys and girls. Besides not taking sweets or drinks from strangers, don't poke questionable drives into your PC ports as well.

Filed under: PC & Peripherals
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bhwong

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bhwong says...
I have also tip off Straits Times' Digital Life about this. After helping a few friends to remove them, more contacted me and I just can't keep up. So I decided to post the instructions on my blog and told them to print it out so that they can do it themselves: bhwong.multiply.com... This virus is quite a show off. It will change your wallpaper to UZA O/S version, change your time with UZA O/S and disabled ctrl+alt+del. An infected thumbdrive will automatically infect every PC it plugged in, unless Windows XP autorun/autoplay feature has been disabled. Even so, most ignorance user will be tempt to open the the virus file, named my_personal_data.exe on the thumbdrive, which used a folder icon. Especially when most Windows XP by default, do NOT show known extension such as exe! I have also post another blog to instruct others how to disable autorun/autoplay: bhwong.multiply.com...

Oct 05, 2007 17:11