Attachment stripper???

[99guy]

I have a mother who cannot, let me stress CANNOT keep from clicking every cutesy wootsy e-mail attachment that gets forwarded to her. Needless to say, I spend way too many hours working on her computer removing virus after virus. I run the latest Norton set to check everything and auto update and zone alarm but some get by.



This morning I ran Stinger by Mcafee on her system, it removed over 200 virus files ranging from Sasser to trojans and this still didn’t clean the system up. Whatever her latest is it shuts down Norton, halts the auto update, and blocks every web based antivirus site I can think of so ……………………. .

This afternoon I send number 1 son over to reformat and start over, he works that out and tonight mother calls and says after being on her computer a short while she has it again!!!





HELP … we need a program to run silently in the background and strip her e-mail of every single attachment that comes her way, any suggestions ???

 

[AggieJustin]

What OS was this on? Since you've already reformatted the drive and started over, this won't be much help now... but maybe it will help someone else.



I just cleaned a friend of mine's computer last week for Sasser and found a few other viruses on there. One of them was behaving just like you described. Causing errors in Norton that kept it from starting on boot-up, blocking all the antivirus sites which in turn screws up LiveUpdate. In order to clean this one, you'll need to open up your "hosts" file. The virus basically writes all the known anti-virus sites into the hosts file and redirects them back to the 127. 0. 0. 1, which is your local machine. This prevents you from ever finding them on the web since the URL is never actually looked up through DNS. In order to get to Norton's site to download the latest updates, you need to remove all those new entries from the hosts file. The only entry you should leave in the file is the one that looks like (unless you've put some entries of your own in there):



127. 0. 0. 1 localhost



You have to watch out, cause some of them are tricky enough to even push their entries way to the bottom of the file so that when you open it the first time, you don't think any extra entries are in there.



You can also search the web and find some other instructions on how to clean the hosts file.

 

[guava]

you might try this...

If she is an outlook user, you can install this: link



It works great.



Its specific to outlook though. Another option is to go into the options/configurations part of the email program she uses and set it to skip downloading any mail program over a certain size. Not guaranteed to strip them all but should help.

 

[99guy]

Originally posted by AggieJustin

What OS was this on? Since you've already reformatted the drive and started over, this won't be much help now... but maybe it will help someone else.



I just cleaned a friend of mine's computer last week for Sasser and found a few other viruses on there. One of them was behaving just like you described. Causing errors in ...

This box is running XP Home. Do you know in particular what virus was causing those Norton errors and redirects, that sure sounds familar. I though maybe it was a Netsky virus but I ran a cleaner and still had the problem.

 

[BarryG]

I got hit with one of the Klez variants a year or so ago and thats what it did. What a pain in the rear to get rid of. Somehow I got to symantecs website and downloaded the tool to a disk. You boot up on that disk and the tool will run and eridicate it then you can reboot normally and go back to the website and do the update to prevent future infections. Not sure if that is what you have but does act the same though klez has been around for a while the norton should have caught it.



By the way I feel for you. My mother is pretty careful about her email but really likes to download about every free/shareware item on the net. If you click on programs it will literally fill the screen and still have a down arrow for more. Fortunately for me my brother in law is a major computer geek and is called upon frequently to go over and deal with the problems that creates. I have now grown stupid on computers and will continue to get more stupid as time goes by (hey what are brother in laws for anyway, actually he is an all right guy even more so for dealing with it).

 

[AggieJustin]

Originally posted by 99guy

This box is running XP Home. Do you know in particular what virus was causing those Norton errors and redirects, that sure sounds familar. I though maybe it was a Netsky virus but I ran a cleaner and still had the problem.

I don't remember which one it was, there are so many floating around right now it's hard to keep track of the names.



I get called over to this guy's house every couple of months (or whenever the next big virus comes out) to do some cleaning. He's running on dialup, so he doesn't keep up with the Windows updates. At least I finally got him to starting keeping his virus defs current, although he didn't notice this last time that they had stopped updating.



One of the other symptoms I saw on that machine was that it was try to connect to some site out on the web every few seconds. Since he was on dialup and not connected, you would see the requests constantly popping up asking to connect. Most all of the IPs were located somewhere around Amsterdam.

 

[klenger]

Sounds like a good case for WebTV or something like that.

 

[Philip]

If she is using outlook. Go into options and set it to not download attachements. Its in Options under security. No attachments will show from then on.

 

[Sled Puller]

I would stop fixing it for her. When she has to pay someone to do it, she'll learn.

 

[JSmith]

On my new computer I installed Norton and it won`t let bad attachments through. Maybe you should wipe out her hard drive and then install Norton. When I get attachments that are bad I can`t open them.

 

[fest3er]

Originally posted by 99guy
... HELP … we need a program to run silently in the background and strip her e-mail of every single attachment that comes her way, any suggestions ???

FrontGate MX is a program that may just do what you want. It's free, but it's also kind-of young, so you may have to work a bit to get it to work. As much as I like the Anomy Email Sanitizer I installed on my server, I think I'd rather use this on at least some people's computers, as I really don't have the time to completely and properly configure the sanitizer.

FGMX has the ability to 'mangle' filename extensions, so that anything that is directly executable cannot be run without at least some effort.

If you don't like FGMX, you might do a search for POP or email proxies, which is the general class of software you need.

N

 

[99guy]

Thanks guys, got the thing going the way we want it for now, cross yer fingers ... ... ... ... ... ...