Quote:
Originally Posted by GR8 WHITE
... when I tried to download a music file which "did not open". Oh, it opened all right.....
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I didn't read this whole thread, just the OP. But from your description, it doesn't sound like your problem has anything to do with limewire. I have never used limeware, although I rather suspect it is not malicious in and of itself.
It sounds like you downloaded an executable (although you thought you were downloading a music file), ran it, and it jacked your system. It's a little hard to tell for sure from your description. If so, that's not the fault of the mechanism that got the file to your system. You could just as well have FTP'ed it, or downloaded it from a malicious web page. A friend of mine had his system owned by some stupid little "registry utility" he downloaded from the web - of course without source available. It's an important distinction to make. You downloaded a file from a highly untrusted source (some other random person(s) on the net) and didn't verify *what* you got - not even whether it was data or an executable. That doesn't make limewire a "malicious virus".
Windows does a very poor job of keeping non-technically literate users from running malware - it makes it far, far too easy to confuse data files and executables (as I suspect you did), *and* it has the largest market share and the most viruses, *and* there are some core reasons why it's easier to compromise a windows machine than other OSs, so that's a bad combo all the way around. I don't recommend doing this sort of thing with a Windows OS.
You should *never* run any executable that you download from any non-trusted source unless you can compile it from source yourself *especially* if it's an exe that is pretending to be a music or video file. If you can compile it, you know (a) you're running the program that the source describes, and (b) you can reasonably verify the source as non-malicious. Anything else is just begging to have your machine jacked. The only safe way to do it is in a virtual machine which you can roll back to a known good state if what you ran was malware. Of course, MS doesn't want you running the consumer versions of their OS in a VM, so part of the price you pay for having agreed that Microsoft can restrict your use of your own property is that it's harder to experiment safely with unknown things.
Most people made the choice back in the 80's to run a very, very insecure OS (at the time, even without 15-year old accepted security such as privilege rings or enforced runtime separation of data and code (can you say stack overruns ladies and gents?) ) and then they wonder why it became a haven for viruses and malware. It has improved since then, but still has large security flaws. Yes, it's got the biggest market share so is the biggest target. But most of the blame lies at the feet of a public that values ignorance over understanding (in general - not trying to blame any specific person. But computers have been around for 50+ years now).
