Backdoor viruses & passwords

I haven't been able to run a virus program for several years on my Win2K SP3; I was infested with the Xorala/Harmony/Valla virus, a "harmless" parasite (It merely added a childish political slogan mostly to the .EXE files in System32, but did not affect performance). However, all the antivir apps squealed and interrupted constantly when they discovered it in thousands of files. Nevertheless, with a combination of the F-Prot scanner, and the new CyberScrub antivir, a disk imager, and some judicious deletions in Safe Mode (with a slipstreamed SP4 disk in the CD drive), I rid myself of every instance of Xorala together with the many backdoor virs, trojans and worms that had established themselves in the absence of protection. About ten hours work, but I now have a real-time CyberScrub gatekeeper in the tray, and no instance of even one dirty file. And the system is functioning beautifully.

In the course of Googling for advice, I discovered an intelligent exchange a couple of years ago as someone tried to eliminate Xorala from his machine. It was to be a vain attempt, but in the course of the exchange he was told that the cyber kiddies delight in a machine without a strong password. Tonight I hit <Ctrl><Alt><Del> and added a pretty good one to my system. EXCEPT: when I "Shut Down ", I can boot the system without a password being required; when I "Log Off ", I'm asked for a password. I'm a single user, and configuring for passwords is foreign to me. What did I do when I went from old password (nothing) to sturdy, grizzled new password?
Best regards,
Bob Bollini

 

Interesting. Not sure exactly what happened but two things to try (and you are maybe looking at some lingering changes done to you by the critters you had)

- right-click on My Computer, left-click on Manage, go to user & groups then to users. Right-click on your account and select the password option then put in the password. This should be writing to the same location as you did with the CAD and password but maybe not. Truthfully I've never put in an initial password that way.

- after that, have your 2K CD and the latest SP either on CD or on the hard drive somewhere and then click on start => run, key in

Code:

sfc /scannow

and click OK.