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Finally Back, Serious PC Questions (Off-Topic)

by slycrel ⌂, Tuesday, February 07, 2017, 18:24 (2606 days ago) @ Morpheus

It's been two long arduous months and my computer has finally been returned to me. I suffered through the worst customer experience of my life, and I have to pull everything together once again. I had to take my computer back to this worthless technician five times, each with the same problem. The symptom was the same each visit, but the cause always seemed to be something off the top of his head; he certainly made a point to openly blame me every single step of the way, accusing me of everything from downloading pirated content to singlehandedly dismantling my own computer to break it intentionally just to get free service.

Long story short, he eventually 'discovered' the real reason for my 1962: He claims that one of the programs I downloaded/installed had a virus that "knocked the drive out" and caused it to crash. Now yes, I am aware I had a lot of programs installed, but most of them(i.e. Steam Games, Microsoft Store, software websites) were direct, from trusted sites and not from 3rd-party mirrors. Anyway, he told me that the virus was embedded in one of my programs, and he didn't know which. He also told me that no virus scanner could find it, "being so deeply buried, even Microsoft wouldn't be able to find it".

I told him I have a copy of all my application setups on my external hard drive, and asked him why the virus wouldn't attack the external hard drives, and he said the virus would know the difference and would not activate until installed on an actual computer. He basically said the only way I could find out which program has a virus is after the virus attacks and destroys my computer again.

What he said seemed to make some sense, but then again this guy is a crook. What doesn't make sense is that out of all the programs I've installed over so many years and so many computers, I've never had a problem with any of them--I'm about 65% sure I didn't install any programs between November and December, when I first started getting these messages.

So is it true?

1) Can a virus differentiate between an external hard drive and an internal one and know when to strike?

2)Can nothing stop--or at least find--something like this??

3) Is it possible for a virus to have a "scheduled release"? Maybe something I installed a long time ago and only started attacking recently?

4) Can a virus really wipe out a whole operating system, and why?

5)Most importantly, is there really no other way to find out the identity/location of the virus than play Minesweeper with my applications and guarantee another two week billion dollar service by someone else?

Short answer is yes, pretty much all of those are true. :(

#1 -- yes, because your computer's OS can. a virus doesn't have to write this functionality (though it can), it can piggyback on existing functionality to do this.

#2 is the most controversial one in your list. There are various ways viruses hide, and the only real way for a virus checking program to be sure is to find pre-existing patterns. There are always new ways to hide and new vectors of attack, so for a time at least, viruses can go undetected. So the more common (and more destructive) the virus, the more likely it can be caught and quarantined.

#3 is definitely a thing. Think of the "malware" that threatens to encrypt your HDD unless you pay someone off. That's essentially a timed virus. A virus is just like any other computer program -- it can be written to do all sorts of things, including check the time and date. Either via the internet or, more likely, your system clock.

#4 is an absolutely yes. It can go even further, and make hardware unusable. Your operating system is jsut a framework of programs that give better "context" and functionality to other programs. So, for the same reason that a text editor can load and save files on a HDD, a virus can use the same kinds of system calls to get that job done. But back to your question, if the data or files that the operating system needs in order to run properly get mangled, erased, or otherwise corrupted by a virus then you can potentially not run your OS properly. Your HDD, motherboard and other components often also have their own mini-harddrive like storage that they use to run themselves off of. A virus can hide in those or corrupt them as well, potentially making them expensive paperweights.

#5 gets kind of back to #2 -- it dpeends on the virus and what it does. The worst kind inject themselves into other kinds of files (or even spread across multiple files) and can lay dormant until those files are accessed and the virus gets activated. I've heard of some viruses using "bad sectors" on the HDD to hide information in as well. So if you know what virus you're looking for and what it does then yes, you can go after it. But some of the worst adapt themselves to your system so there is no easy way to say "look here, here and here for the virus". You can keep paying someone to keep digging, but it becomes a matter of diminishing returns at that point.

It's a little like identity theft -- the system is built to assume trust, and once it's broken it's hard to get everything back to "trusted" status again.

Sounds painful, I hope you got everything you need back...!


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