The Best of the Worst Malware Experiences

In our last weekend's What's the worst malware experience you've had? story, quite a lot of our readers revisited their nightmarish malware attacks. For that we'd like to thank each and every one of you who took the time to type out your experiences.

Unfortunately, we only have four copies of Norton 360 v4.0 to give away as prizes. As hard as it was to select the best, we did find four stories that stood apart. We start with our first winner Dr. Kislay. This is his story:

"When i was doing post grad in medicine , my friend had a presentation to do in front of whole department . day before that he had been browsing some adult site as we knew it later . he started the presentation and then suddenly out of the blue a message flashed on screen " the file horse having s** with woman can not be found " . and man were we shocked . there was a stunned silence for a minute and the guy instead of just removing the usb cable to projector kept on fumbling with cancel button which didn't work . finally my h.o.d. just bombarded him out of the hall , and after that we all were laughing hysterically . we later knew his antivirus was a dud . that incident i can't forget ever. :)"

Our second winner is Prasad Shetty. This was his very awkward work-related story:

"Yeah, back a few years ago I was a systems engineer for a large call center. We managed to get the lovebug virus internally. I worked for weeks trying to clear it, but everytime we thought we had cleared it, it came back.

In the end I decided to work all weekend and visit each individual machine on the network one at a time. I finally found the machine that was propagating the virus, it belonged to a "larger" lady, who had saved the email in her personal folders as it was from a manager titled "I Love You!"

She thought he had sent it to her personally, not knowing it was actually a virus!"

Our third winner is� Ajai Dev, who very extensively describes his dilemma:

"I had a very bad virus that killed my computer 3 different times in the same day.

This all happened after i downloaded and installed a free Chinese online multiplayer game. When i installed it the virus scanner did not pick up the virus at all. "Should have bought one instead of using a free AVG one"

I tried to run the game and it did not work when i clicked the exe button the screen went blank and there was noting, i had to hard reset the PC and in middle of the XP loading screen the bar stopped and PC hung. It was same for the next few bootup's, i tried safemode and it did not work after the loading driver screen the thing did not bootup.

Now i was thinking a reinstall is needed installed in C: "Formatted" where the game was and the windows portion was.

Sadly i did not realize that the virus had infected the d: and e: also not to mention my pen drive.

After i reinstalled everything and Avast i taught i am home free but it was not so when i inserted my pen drive to copy my data avast dialog popes up and says "Virus alert". I was happy that it had detected it and i am safe well that was not the case it detected it but did not stop it or quarantined it. My system once again was in the hands of the virus i tried updating Avast and put in on boot time scan and did a reboot.

Again when windows was loading the bar just stopped and pc hung again :( i again had to do a full installation since safemode did not work this time around either.

After a 2nd full reinstall i tried a paid anti virus "Mcafee anti virus"

It took ages for it to scan the whole computer and id the viruses and deleting them was a pain because it said the "DLL file is being used, etc"

Mcafee said i need to restart the system to delete all the files and i clicked yes after the restart the system stopped at XP loading "bar" :( it took another reinstall of everything now the system is working ok and seems that the virus was taken care of by Mcafee.

So indeed its true paid software is much better than free ones."

And our final winner is Keerthi Chandra who figured that the best way to get rid of a Windows virus was through Linux:

"The Ramvon.exe virus.

I hated this one..i had to format everything from hard disk, pendrives, even my IPOD!!!lost everything...Some how the effected files also got attached to my email...and you know the rest..This virus, self replicates creates a copy in every folder and obv. doesnt let you eject any USB drive :(

Fix : opened ubuntu .deleted each and every file manually(ramvon.exe)"