What Would Cause This Virus?

[TitoGianotti]

Virus DOS. Serg. 424 In my Firestorm App/Data/Roaming/Firestorm/TitiGianotti/resident browser profile cache. It's treated but how'd I get it?

[Ted McGregor]

That's an old virus from 1998.

It's more likely it's a false positive by your virusscanner. Can happen with a cache because sometimes files are partially downloaded or completely, which confuses virusscanners. The files in the cache are harmless since they cannot be excecuted on your system.

Best clean your cache regularly to avoid such issues.

[Theresa Tennyson]

Probably a false alarm. Sometimes anti-virus programs falsely identify compressed files in the cache as viruses. Even if it's real it's a DOS virus from years ago and shouldn't be able to do anything to a system running an operating system that can run SL.

[Freya Mokusei]

Typically viruses of this type pass infections from Email attachments or removable media drives. It is doubtful that browsing the Internet would infect you, and nothing in SL would be able to do it either.

DOS.Serg.424 is a variant of  the Serg virus, and replicates its way through the targets file system. This is likely why it is present within your Second Life cache (it looks for recently created files and infects those).

As with responses above, a false-positive is likely. I see this tag is the name given by Kaspersky Lab; Kaspersky is well-known to have a very high false-positive count. There is little point scanning the files in the SL cache, as they cannot be infected via SL and partially-downloaded files can appear to look exactly like viruses (hence false-positive). Scanning these files as they download wastes computer processing power and slows down the download.

Glad you managed to clear it up. =]

[TitoGianotti]

Alright, thanks guys.

[wiked Anton]

I had a program called Malwarebytes, which was excellent until they tried to improve it. It start detecting files in my in my business program as viruses. I was forever allowing them and taking them out of quarantine,  if I didn't my program wouldn't open.