was my computer hacked/virus?

K

KingSalamander

Registered
I'm operating on a PowerBook G4 OS X 10.3.9

Last week I tried to download a DMG file from **. Nothing seemed to happen and i couldn't find where the file had been placed. On Sunday night I went to play some songs from itunes. My intunes folder apparently seemed to be erased. But everything else was normal. I looked at my shared folder and it didn't show where the files were, and my hard drive space didn't reflect the loss of files.

I made fateful error of restarting my computer. When I restarted my computer it erased all my preferences and duplicated my identity and put my old hard drive in shared folder. Also all the security had been turned off. It also either erased, or hid all of my address book, contact info, and emails that i used through entourage. I have tried to rebuild data base and find the text files to no avail. Either they are well hidden or deleted. I ran norton on my computer and found nothing. I did manage to find all my intues stuff as an invisible folder.

When I looked at my CPU log it seems alot of these changes were made about 12:30am on Feb 3rd. Does it seem like a third party was was operating my computer from outside source? It specifically said something about Entourage ACMUtext files being depracated?

Unfortunately none of my entourage identities or address book were backed up. so i am frantically looking for them. Also my computer seems to have about ten giga bytes less space than it did two days ago.

Whats Going on!!!!


Martin
 
goto your shareing prifs and see if any thing like windows shareing has ben truned on or Apple remote desktop has been truned on. look for anything that you might have not truned on yourself. I don't know how this whould happen but that dmg file you opened my have run a applesript in the back ground. If so I would say do a Aricve Reinstall of your OS that way your data does not get massed with no mater what might have happend. then get a data recover tool off the the web and run it. if you can't find one I have one that works very good at founding "Lost files" I know i had some files go missing on me and when I run it I found stuf that was not even mine.the person that sold me my G4 desktop had not done a lowlevel format on it so I found my files and some other things that I went a head and sent to the digale never never land.
 
Thanks I'm a little nervous about re installing because i don't want to lose these fiels that already may be lost. I will email for that software. Do you think I have been hacked? If so how did they do it.
 
I'm not usually the one to chime in on this, but we always seem to learn the hard way about downloading software illegally.

When you look in your Users folder, is the name with a house (instead of a folder) the name you'd expect it to be? Or is it a new folder with a name other than your shortname?
 
Sounds like the shell script that was floating around in those illegal networks a while back. It basically runs a rm -rf command on your home folder (deletes everything without a notice) since you were silly enough to download something and run it. So no, you weren't hacked. You just unwittingly did the damage yourself by running the script. The moral of the story is buy your software like everyone else and this kind of thing wouldn't happen.

Hopefully you had a backup, else your stuff is probably lost. I'd suggest removing that program ASAP and not using it or any similar to it in the future. It also should be noted that talking about such programs is a violation of our board rules here and severely frowned upon.
 
I apologize for not following board ettiquette, and I have indeed learned a lesson. I don't have the program on my computer, i'm only guessing thats what it is, because i was in ** at the time.
 
My shortname has not been changed for the house icon in users file, but my original user file was somehow place in shared folder. If it were indeed a virus why didn't norton anti virus pick up on that?
 
short answer: Norton Anti-Virus for OS X is a placebo. Anti-virus programs look for known viruses. Since there ARE no known viruses for the Mac, Norton has nothing to look for.

Advice: Remove all Norton related programs on your computer. Norton's Utitlities have caused no end of problems and no actual reported benefits (just search this forum :) )
 
(Actually, Mac antiviral software of course looks for Windows viruses, too. And while there are no confirmed viruses for the Mac platform, some antiviral software makers claim to have _found_ Mac viruses in the wild. While they've all turned out _not_ to be viruses at all and _not_ in the wild either, you're still right about the placebo.)

KingSalamander: Read the board rules again about P2P etc. Had to correct your posts a little (removing the name of the software etc.).
 
There's already a thread where the virtues of AV software on OS X has thoroughly been debated. There's also been a huge number of threads in the past about the issues the Norton suite (including the AV program) cause under OS X. So with that said, lets keep this one on the topic at hand.
 
Trying to download a '.dmg' file (and being unsuccessful), or having actually download a '.dmg' file - will not result in any auto-launching anomaly.

If the '.dmg' was successfully downloaded, the '.dmg' file would then have to be double clicked to mount the respective disk image; and finally, the questionable downloaded application then would have to be double clicked on to be launched. Even then, the 'Authenticate' window may appear during the installation - depending where files may be installed. At this point, one may then be potentially vulnerable.

'we always seem to learn the hard way about downloading software illegally', what specific illegal software was downloaded to make such a statement?

'Sounds like the shell script that was floating around in those illegal networks a while back.', what was the specific name of the shell script? And when? Had one actually existed, it would have been published in print and on the internet.

'If it were indeed a virus why didn't norton anti virus pick up on that?' ... 'short answer: Norton Anti-Virus for OS X is a placebo.' Because you did not have a MacOS (nor a PC) virus. NAV is not a placebo - its intent is to detect and hopefully remove viruses of the Intel / Intel clone based Windows running PCs that happen to reside on one's Mac; and, to generate additional income for Symantec.

I just downloaded the originally mentioned peer to peer application (and deleted by those so very concerned), and downloaded a couple of '.dmg' files. Not one was auto mounted, nor its contents auto launched or auto installed.

The original post does not state enough information, in a logical sequence - the order of events taken, to verify that the use of the peer to peer application (and the attempt to download the '.dmg' file) - were the fault of the unfortunate sequence of deletions, duplications, and / or moving of files, etc.
 
<<< The original post does not state enough information, in a logical sequence - the order of events taken, to verify that the use of the peer to peer application (and the attempt to download the '.dmg' file) - were the fault of the unfortunate sequence of deletions, duplications, and / or moving of files, etc.>>>.

I agree. I just assumed that because I was trying to back track about what I did out of ordinary in last couple of days. I'm not very knowledgable on this sort of thing... and it seemed to be most logical answer. Regardless of what happened I'm re installing OSX. I permanently lost my Entourage files and my preferences. Also some documents in Dreamweaver.

just out of curiosity what are people's opinions on Entourage vs. Mac Mail?
 
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