MAC virus ... need help please!

I started online classes and have been spending a lot more time on the internet and now have a virus. I found out by trying to send a word document with gmail and it telling me that my document had a virus. I sent the document with my excite address and was able to get it out, have a friend clean it, and send it back ... then it was fine but when I edited the document and sent it out again, it had the virus all over again.

I've been looking for a program to get rid of it and bought Norton Internet Security but as this is a preventative, it only protects me from anything new from coming in. I was just talking with tech support for Norton via the symantec site and am told that the ONLY way to get rid of whatever virus I have is to pay their people $99.95 to have them remotely remove it. PLEASE tell me this is not my ONLY option.

 

To be fair, it sounds like you have a Microsoft Word virus, not a Mac virus. You must still have an infected template somewhere or something.

Try this advice:

http://apps.carleton.edu/campus/its/training/macrovirus/

 

forget about being fair.... lets be realistic...

you probably have a 'cross platform' virus that affects not just windows, but also OSX as well as Linux.

I read this earlier and was wondering when people would start posting probs

http://www.tech.co.uk/computing/int...penoffice-worm-spreading?articleid=1437116187

 

Thanks for the reply.

You wouldn't happen to have a user id and password for the carlton edu site would ya?

Are there any sites you can recommend that I could download Virex Anti-Virus from?

 

No, I was recommending trying the advice there about removing the files they mention.......... as for antivirus software, not sure.

 

Compress the word document into a tar.gz or .rar file, and send that. When you receive it on a Windows machine make sure to scan the archive before extracting the word document.

 

I doubt it. Cross platform virus are, in practice, nothing more than a theoretical nuisance. While there might be vulnerabilities in OO that affect all platforms (as it happened before with zlib for example), exploiting different OSs in a meaningful way is another story alltogether.
I concur the OP must have some kind of infected template for Word. Tips:
1) backup your data to an external media;
2) Uninstall and reinstall Office for Mac, if that what you use. That should get rid of the rogue template or whatever it is, as long as you don't use it again, so
3) scan your data (in windows) and see exactly which virus you had and in which files. Then delete them.

 

OK thank you.

 

You were right. I found a free online scan and it found a macro virus called W97M_THUS.

Thanks for your help.

 

Glad to hear you got it sorted out.