Ummm help??

[Ninja Sportz]

Well for the last like 4 hours or so i have not been able to get on and change my skills.  I am able to get to the internet through Firefox, IE, Chrome and Safari and i can get on AIM.  Everything else eats shit when i try and connect to the internet...


Programs included:  Steam, Eve, Vent, TS, LimeWire, uTorrent, Skype...


Any ideas??

[Pezzle]

first thing I think, you picked up some sort of virus.

[lac]

Maybe your firewall somehow started applying outgoing restrictions. Browsers (don't know about aim) all go over tcp/80, a pretty standard port to allow outbound traffic over. The other stuff  you mentioned uses arbitrary ports that wouldn't be enabled by default by a program controlling outgoing traffic.

In the worst case your ISP has decided to block everything higher than tcp/1024 but I don't think they do that anymore.

[5150]

IT sounds like the reasons you browsers work is because they probably connect via a proxy, the rest of the stuff wont.

can you do NSLOOKUP www.google.com and TRACERT www.google.com from a command prompt?

[Ninja Sportz]

i can do the nslookup but it wont let me run the tracert command...


also now thinking about it...this all started after i installed uTorrent a few days ago.  Ive been downloading music and all constantly.  Then i had to restart my computer because of a Microsoft Update(fuck those updates...i hate them...) and when my comp restarted all of a sudden nothing had internet connection where it did before...dont know if this helps with figuring out the problem or not...

[Pezzle]

did you open or run any of those things you grabbed from utorrent?

[Ninja Sportz]

it was jsut discographies from piratebay for my itunes...i downloaded them and put them on my itunes then deleted the .torrent file...

[schild]

Heh.

[Ninja Sportz]

Heh.

i so have a feeling your about to laugh in my face and and tell me why everything isnt working...

[Pezzle]

first thing I think, you picked up some sort of virus.

Fixing this while keeping your data intact (if I am right) will require you have tools on hand already or another machine.  Some can be removed easier than others.

[Phildo]

Heh.

i so have a feeling your about to laugh in my face and and tell me why everything isnt working...

He is!

[schild]

Heh.

i so have a feeling your about to laugh in my face and and tell me why everything isnt working...

[Pezzle]

hahahaha

[Ninja Sportz]

first thing I think, you picked up some sort of virus.

only thing is ive run a few different virus scans already and nothing has come up...not that they always do i know...but still...i cant afford to have my laptop out of commission especially with the end of the semester coming up and my desktop already being out of commission with a fried motherboard...that i still havent replaced...

[Pezzle]

there are plenty of things that do not show up on your run of the mill virus scanners.  Which one are you using?

[Ninja Sportz]

Well McAfee and Norton i have run like 3 times each...and i know i have spysweeper somewhere on my laptop but i have so much crap installed on here that i need to go through and clean out my harddrive...then maybe i would be able to find shit on here...haha...stupid engineering major and them giving me all these different programs to use...


well ima jsut do my virus scans again and head to bed...going to the flyers hockey game tomorrow...hopefully i can figure something out...

[Trippy]

Is the Windows Firewall or something similiar turned on?

[apocrypha]

i so have a feeling your about to laugh in my face and and tell me why everything isnt working...

[/quote]

Argh I just hurt myself laughing at that. Please tell me it's real. 

[Phildo]

That is absolutely real.

[Nerf]

Is it local? I want a copy!

[schild]

San Francisco, last year, I believe.

[Yoru]

Given that there's a @badgerherald.com email address and a Madison, WI-addressed advertisement, I'd doubt it's in San Francisco.

[5150]

This is a semi wild stab in the dark inspired by the fact you have recently done windows update

If you have the ipsec service running set it to disabled reboot and retry

What's your setup btw? Do you have a router or adsl modem?

[Faust]

I called tex support for you  Appearanty the innernets were down today and as it's a u.s. Holliday there was nobody to reboot the world server. 

[Ninja Sportz]

Is the Windows Firewall or something similiar turned on?

My Firewall is actually turned off...

[schild]

Is the Windows Firewall or something similiar turned on?

My Firewall is actually turned off...

You sir, are a cancer attractor.

[apocrypha]

My Firewall is actually turned off...

So... you installed a bittorrent client and started downloading lots of illegal music and other stuff. And you turned your firewall off? Now you're having computer problems....

 

[Ninja Sportz]

Is the Windows Firewall or something similiar turned on?

My Firewall is actually turned off...

You sir, are a cancer attractor.

lol...i never realized it was off...it is back on now...i think what i might end up doing is just completely wiping my hard drive and restoring my original settings...because of all the music i download my parents are giving me one of their external hard drives so i can back up some stuff anyway...

[apocrypha]

Yeah back all that illegal stuff you downloaded up before you format and reinstall. Good plan. What could possibly go wrong?

[Reg]

Regular old .mp3 files can't pass viruses can they?

[apocrypha]

Ive been downloading music and all constantly.

My emphasis. I'm assuming that means there's more than music there.

Also, I am partly just being a grumpy twat here, having a bad day for various reasons and just taking it out on this poor sod. Sorry mr "ninja sportz" (heh, ok).

[Ninja Sportz]

well actually it was only music...but some of the songs did come in different formats than jsut mp3...


some of them were in wma and m4a formats

[Jayce]

One old trick is to name a file something.mp3.exe.  Then if you have "known file extensions" turned off (the default  ) you click on it thinking it's an mp3.  "Nothing" happens so you delete the file thinking it's corrupt, but what it really did was copy its trojan code to your machine, set to run on bootup.

There are assuredly other ways to make that sort of thing happen too.  A virus scanner without its definitions up to date, or ones that are just simply trash (*cough*McAfee) will not pick up on some zero-day exploits and newly released viruses.

edit: do a quick google for "mp3 exploit", and you'll see there are many.

[Ninja Sportz]

Yeah back all that illegal stuff you downloaded up before you format and reinstall. Good plan. What could possibly go wrong?

ooo yea...also in response to this...i dont need to backup the music i downloaded...its already on my iPod and i have that on manual sync so as long as i never turn that off and sync it with my comp i can do without backing them up...

[Endie]

Regular old .mp3 files can't pass viruses can they?

You can encode payloads to exploit specific media player (small 'm' and 'p') vulnerabilities even in media files that are nominally non-executable.  Usually these exploit buffer overflow vulnerabilities.  .avi files are particularly shit, historically.  You used to be able to overwrite heap memory even from a web page like this.

iTunes before 4.8 certainly had vulnerabilities.  WMV files were created to wrap additional functionality around movies, such as accessing web pages for digital verification and so on.  A webpage with a malware payload combined with a machine on which regular Windows Updates have not been carried out is a problem.

It's still strange that the machine is totally disabled.  These days, there is more money in making zombies.  But hey: pay for your music  

Also, don't you owe me ISK? ;)