Aaargh! My Girlfriend’s computer got chewed up by a virus. A VBS virus that deleted windows\system32 and copied itself to every shortcut and *.htm or *.hta or *.chm document on every drive. If I remember the 1300 or so messages that scrolled by as I ran F-Prot on the crippled machine, it was VBS.Haptime.A. Note the M.O:
…The script then looks for .htm, .vbs, .asp, and .htt files in all folders on both local and mapped drives. If the sum of the current day and the current month is 13, then the script tries to delete all .exe and .dll files.
Yesterday was the 10th of Febuary. So the infection could have happened weeks or months ago, and it was only piss-poor luck that my girlfriend was working on her computer yesterday.
Damn.
So now I feel that what I wrote about anti-virus software a while back was a bit harsh. And I can see why people treat Wscript like poison instead of like a viable programming runtime. There are benefits to writing programs in a scripting language which requires downloading a special runtime, one that isn’t installed by default by lots of standard MS software and therefore a great big gaping security hole which deserves to be plugged up as soon as possible.
Damn.