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The company we're dealing with providing us with the company programme been coming to our office with a memory stick full of viruses. he kept inserting it on each and every desktop an server until he infected all machines.

There are no anti viruses install on the machines cuz they are all offline, contain no cddrives, and no one is allowed to use a memory stick. so it should have been safe.


now... they're saying all of our computers have viruses and they can't update our systems. we must format!!!!

how can i proof that the viruses came from his memory stick? we need a proof that its from them so we can make them pay for repairs.

 

do you have access to the memory stick?

 

If your company PCs are all offline, you can try using a portable antivirus application that you can run straight from USB.

You can check out Portable Antivirus Firewall Apps from Pendriveapps.

They offer a diverse selection of various portable applications you can run straight from your USB. While most of those programs will probably not be as updated as full, paid, non-portable antivirus programs; they will still probably be able to detect some of the viruses on your company PCs.

Or you could just get hold of that memory stick and scan it with a notebook that has a card reader and AV.

 

to answer your question.

It depends on the virus. Many viruses will create a directory to install to--check the date of the folder creation and you can at least say, this guy was in our office at this time.

Even if there is no virus folder, the virus has files. Now, sometimes, the viruses morph over time and the date changes, however, most viruses involve more than one file and at least one of those may have a date and time stamp of the original installation.

You can almost always nail down the date and time of an infection provided you know what the infection's characteristics are.

 

i don't have an answer to ur question but i want u to know that u can install kaspersky antivirus and download the updates from any place u have access to the internet then install it on the offline computers , if u need the link for the instructions PM me , this will help u protect your PCs in the future

 

Or even try Avira (Free) antivirus. There's been a virus going around via email with the words "FOTO 10/27" in the Subject or something to that effect. If you go to Task Manager they would usually leave a bunch of nl7.exe processes....Avira cleaned up all of those viruses in no time.

The only thing is that Avira (at least the Free version) cannot be deployed. So if you're company is big; like say over 40 or so users it might be a pain to go around and install it on their machines.

PS: The only way I see of getting proof is to actually insert the flash drive into a PC that hasn't been infected.

 

Simple, bring a laptop that has an antivirus (i.e. Norton Antivirus, ESET, Kaspersky, AVAST!, etc.) installed in it and ask everyone to be a witness as you scan that suspicious, memory stick which is blatantly the culprit of that contagion spread in all the office computers. With that, everyone will know who should be ACCOUNTABLE of the crime so he would shoulder all the expenses for repairs or whatsoever damage his irresponsibility caused.

 

The thing is though, some of those virus programs see certain files and tag them as viruses but they might not be viruses. You may actually know what the file is too...I think it's best to just get a clean computer to be a guinea pig so to speak; insert the suspicious flash drive in the computer and watch the virus spread.

BTW OP, how do you know for sure that there is a virus? Computers acting weird? Cause you said that the machines had no antivirus programs. Or you're just going off of what these guys said.

 

Try booting up all those allegedly virus-infected computers in BIOS mode and then proceed to command or prompt mode and choose R (repair). Have someone assisst you in doing that method to the rest of the computers. From that, you can identify the cause and source of the alleged error or virus which is either made by that contagious USB or something else, like a failing hard drive, etc. You can run chkdsk in the command mode. I did that before in our desktop. After the repair process was done (the blue screen), it displayed a result that my computer is infected by a virus and needs to cleaned and repaired, or in worse instances, must be reformatted. I asked my mum to buy a Norton 360. Installed it and run a boot-up scanning and repaird all the viruses.

 

The shift, period, Y and O keys still screwed up on your keyboard man? Time to save up and buy new keyboard.

Gary