It's probably not the best idea to post infected URLs on the boards, there are people who look through the threads that may be newbies, or perhaps people who will click it out of curiosity, or even by accident. Luckily Freewebs has frozen that account, but just as a future reference. The Forums have a PM feature, so if a specific person is helping you it might be an idea to PM the link to them, particuarly if they've shown an interest in downloading the virus for inspection reasons.
There are also a number of programs which you might like to use, it's better to run more than one (maybe more than two) AV programs as they have different methods of scanning, and some miss files. The following are ones I usually recommend:
AVG (Virus scanner)
Trendmicro (Online virus scan)
SwatIT (Trojan scanner)
The Cleaner (Trojan scanner)
Don't run two at the same time, that could cause problems.
Finally, to reiterate what PastMaster said, do not believe what people tell you. If people tell you that they know where you can get "free nude pictures of Britney" (or versions of that) then it's rubbish. You can usually see ample amounts of Britney on the TV anyway, so just use that
- That's the same for anything which is sent to you via IRC. Ignore messages, ignore DCC transfers, do not use mIRC (or other IRC clients) for mass/illegal file trading (i.e. downloading movies, music etc) as that is a very popular way to give people virus's.
Check in your network's #Help channel and see if the network has a +R (or similar) usermode which blocks unregistered nicknames from messaging you. Some networks support nick registration, if yours does, then this might well be an available mode. You might want to do a search of sites such as
www.mircscripts.org or
www.mirc.net and see if they have "Spam protection" addons which close query messages when sites are sent to you. I recommend those sites simply because they check their submissions for viruses before they allow "the public" to download them.
And for general security, make sure you have the latest Windows updates (most importantly critical updates, but recommended ones are also a good idea) -
www.windowsupdate.comDALnet also set up a good document about how to avoid becoming an unwitting spammer, read it
here.
Have fun!
Regards,
