Virus?

Clam Xav picked up the following two things as virus's. Bat.CMDFlood and PHISHING.HEURISTICS.EMAIL.SPOOFEDDOMAIN. The second one just appears to be a spoofed e-mail. It also picked something else up in the scan but I forget what it is.

Anyways I deleted the files. Should I bother reinstalling my operating system? That is usually what I did in Windows when I found a virus...but I'm not sure if those are legitimate virus's other then the Bat.CMDFlood which seems kind of like a legitimate virus. I'm kind of paranoid about these things because I buy a lot of things online.

Typically I've found just deleting a virus doesn't really get rid of it so what should I do?

 

No, there is no need to re-install OS X if your anti-virus properly removed the files. It also sounds like that is malicious content for Windows so, in the grand scheme of things, there is nothing to worry about. A Windows virus on OS X doesn't do anything, it just kind of sits there posing no threat to OS X. Most OS X anti-virus programs scan for malicious Windows content as well to help stop the spread from OS X to Windows.

 

You reinstalled windows just because you found viruses?

 

Clam Xav doesn't really "remove" the file the way Norton did, it just kind of quarantines it to the trash folder (at least that is what I did).

I guess I'm kind of paranoid, but its always seemed better (at least when I had Windows) to reinstall the OS when I had a virus pop up that wasn't a tracking cookie.

But if its a windows virus and I don't have a windows partition I don't know if I should bother.

 

Yep when I detect a more substantial threat I just wipe out the drive, and after that scan the files if there is some kind of contamination

 

I once found a black widow in my garage. So I took off and nuked the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

 

My dad always did it when I was a kid and he works in the industry, I think its standard procedure if you work for any company working on anything with any sort of secrecy to reinstall the OS.

Even if your anti-virus deletes it technically your computer isn't secure until you reinstall the OS a lot of the time.

 

Indeed not to mention the possible compromise of the entire network, because someone was fool enough to get a mail with a virus and open it.

This happens even on the most secure companies including security companies.

So yes its standard procedure to isolate, wipe out the sub network pcs and see what we can get that aint contaminated by the virus

 

Reinstall every time? You would be lucky since people let updates pile on and then they never get installed. I feel pity for the IT network administrators if they did this for each instance of malware now

 

You shouldn't get virus's from anything other then e-mail at a corporate network unless either somebody is specifically targeting you or you are visiting websites you really shouldn't be visiting on a corporate network anyways.

 

thats what you'd think... but thats not always true. Just like MacDefender that hit really hard not long ago, it was hit just through doing Google image searches.

 

one of the easiest ways some years back, was to infiltrate via buffer overflow, so you got a cookie and the code inside it, made it expand beyond the memory that you were using, after that you could let it have to download/install the other parts of the program. However with executable disable bit that is harder now.

There are several ways, to put a virus in a computer and those are not only for fun.