Alan wrote:
>I'm thinking of putting E & F on flash drives while I clean #1 computer.
>Will I carry the virus into my reworked computer via the drives or not.>>


Quite likely, it depends which of many variants of this virus you have.

There's a whole raft of viruses now coming out which exploit the "link" 
vulnerability of Windows (all versions I think).

A month ago I was cleaning out an infected XP computer. I inserted my flash 
drive, installed Malwarebytes in Safe Mode under a false name and did a 
clean. No problem there.

When I reinserted the flash drive into my own computer later, Avira went 
bananas, telling me that every .exe file on the flash drive was infected. 
The virus had obviously leapt silently from the infected computer to the 
flash drive.

No problem, I simply cleaned out everything off the flash drive and 
reloaded it from a backup which I keep in case of such eventualities.

Sophos Security have been aware of this link exploit and have had a Windows 
patch for it freely available for over 6 months. Microsoft only recently 
caught up with it and issued a security update about a month ago .

Removing that particular virus from the computer rendered XP unbootable, as 
it evidently attaches itself to various system files, so that removing the 
infection also removes (or corrupts) vital system files. Nasty.

So the short answer to Alan's question is---it all depends how badly 
infected the computer is.  But yes, there's a definite risk of one bad 
drive infecting all others as soon as they are connected. Even if you have 
the latest patches, I wouldn't rely on it.

Don Penlington

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