Well I got hit by the Bugbear virus that’s been making it around the net lately. This is the first time I have ever got this kind of virus. This page has a lot of info on this little bastard.

This thing spreads by sending out e-mails to all the people in your address book. To make it even worse it also will disable the popular anti-virus and firewall programs. It also infects a number of popular programs.

And of course it gets even better. This thing also creates a backdoor into your computer so hackers can do whatever it is they do. This is the part that makes me nervous. Here is a list of things they can do with this backdoor this virus creates:

• get information about infected computer
• upload and download files
• start files
• delete files
• terminate processes
• get process list
• start keylogger
• start HTTP server on a selected port

Did you notice the keylogger entry? Yeah that’s just great. Here are the specifics on the keylogging feature of this bug:

It saves user’s keystrokes into a file with a random name and DLL extension located in Windows System folder. The worm periodically sends this file to a randomly selected e-mail address from the list of addresses stored together with the corresponding SMTP server names inside the worm’s body.

I don’t know jack about these kinds of things. But this virus sounds like it’s a clever piece of software (or whatever it’s classified as). I just hope my pc is clean now. I downloaded a few different programs to try to make sure this thing is purged from my pc. As a last resort I’ll just reformat and reinstall my os. I’m not going to dick around with this thing. I’m due for it anyway.