Orkut is infected by jammer worm....

I was in the browsing centre to fill my blog with more nonsense. Normally, I open gmail, orkut and blogger whenever I am in the browsing centre. Today, when I opened Orkut, I got a warning saying, "orkut is sending viruses to your pc. To protect your pc close this window. orkut is infected by jammer worm", and the Internet Explorer window closed by itself.

For a moment, I thought some freeware anti virus installed on the computer was misbehaving. I tried opening Mozilla FireFox, it said that one of the dlls was missing and the window closed by itself. I googled for "orkut is infected by jammer worm". The window closed by itself, when I clicked on the search button, after warning me that orkut is infected by jammer worm.

I tried pinging to http://www.orkut.com/ and the command prompt closed by itself! By then it had occured to my manda buddhi that the computer has been infected by a not so dangerous virus. I opened internet explore and typed http://www.thisisnotorkut.com/. The window closed by itself, of course after warning me that orkut sends viruses to my pc. I pinged to http://www.thisisnotorkut.com/. Same result!

That meant that the virus was just reading my key strokes and whenever it found the word "orkut" on the url bar, it just closed the internet explorer window. (Google passes the search string as query strings in the URL and that is why the window closed when I tried googling on "Orkut is infected by jammer.") I checked the processes that were running. I googled for the meaning and use of the processes. (I found http://www.file.net/ has the listing of most of the processes, with adequate explanations.) I killed unwanted processes initiated by "user".

The problem was resolved after killing "win.exe". File.net says some viruses camouflage themselves as win.exe. And, yeah, Mozilla Firefox started working after this. Looks like the virus was detecting the launch of Mozilla Firefox.