You need to update your antivirus immediately if not sooner!   New viruses
come out every day, yours is one day old.  Your antivirus program is
basically useless and you are unprotected unless you update it, at the very
least, once a week.  I subscribe to a newsletter from www.f-prot.com that
tells me when there is a new version of F-Prot Antivirus available and why I
need to protect myself from the latest threat.  Just yesterday I received an
email describing the one you have, MSBLAST.  I  use their DOS program on a
floppy in my work, it has always been free.  I use AVAST at www.avast.com
for my Windows machines, it is free for home use and it is updated daily
from the internet to my computer...  with no intervention required!
Howard Rubin
The Computer Doctor
Fortaleza, Brazil

RE:  Date:    Tue, 12 Aug 2003 07:06:45 +0800
From:    Greg De Guzman <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Virus or what?

I'm troubleshooting a friend's computer that started behaving erratically
that shows a pop-up after about 5 minutes that says "windows is shutting
down due to a ____ terminated process". The pop-up starts a timer within
itself  after which the system re-starts. This process repeats itself
ad-infinitum everytime the computer re-starts.

I thought of peeking through the start-up list and see what the system was
loading and looked for unfamiliar programs. One entry caught my attention,
and it is "msblast.exe". I did a search from the computer's Start Menu for
the "msblast.exe* and it found the ff:

c:\Windows\System32\msblast.exe

c:\windows\Prefetch\MSBLASTEXE-09FF84F2.pf

Deactivating the "msblast.exe" from the Start-up List stopped the process.

What are these files? Are these Virus Payloads? Nothing was detected through
the Norton AV installed with a Virus Definition dated 6/27/03 after
repeating the Scan.

Thanks for any inputs.


Greg

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