Infected with Virus! Now what?

When I turned on my linpus computer this morning, this appeared:


I think it is a virus. Here's why:
- All I can do as a layman user is drag that darn thing around the screen
- the menu bar, containing the "home" and "power down/restart/sleep" buttons and wireless meter is missing.
- I cannot connect to the internet using FireFox
- I cannot connect to the remote server using Live Update
- I cannot move files (i.e. like this screen shot) to an external flash key drive

When I use the Windows Task Manager equivalent (Ctrl-Alt-Delete) program (forget the name), I see that there are incoming bytes requested. I presume this virus is trying to download stuff in the background. That is of course if I leave the wireless connection turned on (and not for long). I could not identify which process or processes it is - I'm new to linux.

As for how I got the virus, who knows? The last time I used the computer, I was watching Alfred Hitchcock videos on Hulu.com and checking my email. Note, I'm a very experienced technical Windows user (and Windows programmer) who has not used anti-virus protection software for years. Point is in writing this is I'm very cautious and know better than to download mysterious files, open email attachments, etc. That, of course, does not make me immune from catching a virus. Rather with such computer "street smarts" - just a lot less likely. Additionally, I would have thought even more so limiting the possibilities with using such uncommon, relatively speaking, Linux Linpus software. I find it a bit alarming to have caught a virus so easily. Yikes!

Has anyone else experienced this behavoir? I assume it is a virus. If so, now what? I presume scrub the machine clean and then do a reinstall. How so? Thanks!

 

You are not, in fact, infected with a virus. Sorry to disappoint you. It would be a pretty crap virus, anyway - gives you a moveable box to advertise its nefarious presence?!

It's actually your "menu bar" (a panel, in xfce's terms) gone walkabout (or possibly the original panel is deleted, and this is a replacement). Go into panel manager, and order it back to the bottom where it belongs. Use the command

Code:

xfce4-panel -a

to get a dialog box up to replace the missing items.

However, it's possible that if this has happened, other bad stuff has occurred to your system. I guess you'll find out once you've tried to get back to working order.

 

Thanks for the reply. Typing in the command you suggest, works to a point. In my screenshot and the menu bar editor, I learned that icon is the "program launcher", which really does not launch anything. I'm able to rebuild the menu bar, despite the ordering of items being out of whack and the menu bar still floating about the screen. There's still no remote access to the internet or usb drive. Some process is downloading bits and bytes while I have zero connectivity using FireFox or the built in update program.

I've witnessed in-your-face viruses before - the Windows root-kit variety so a "nefarious presence" would not be surprising. That said, I'm not 100% confident this is a virus. I hope it's not, but it sure smells like one. I'm just perplexed at how my machine is suddenly FUBAR, software wise, after handling it with care and having not changed anything recently, i.e. software install or system update.

To further this thought, with respect to the linpus menu bar, I think it is designed rather nicely. It's quite difficult for a novice user (like myself) to inadvertently screw it up. The same cannot be said for Windows XP, i.e. butterfingers with the mouse and resizing it to be nearly invisible, docking it to another side of the screen, etc. My linpus menu bar was nicely locked in place until this morning. Very strange.

Virus or not,, how do I get my machine back to working order? Thanks.

 

Not. This is exactly what you get if you create a new panel. In the panel manager, there's a drop-down box at the top, with a + and -. If you click the +, you'll add another one of these things. Use minus to remove it. You ought to be able to make your panel "fixed" and at the bottom of the screen as before.

I can't help you with getting network connection back. I'd advise asking daldred - I've seen him fix several people's network manager, but it takes several steps to first find out what's bust.

 

Thanks again for your help.

Using the panel manager, I could not get the menu bar to dock or return to its original and more economical height and width. Between that and an array of other problems like disk access and wireless connectivity, I decided using the Acer Linpus restore CD was the best option. Thaty took all of 45 minutes to do, between create the bootable memory stick and the install.

 

this has happened to me this evening when i switched on my acer. i used xfce4-panel -a in terminal and panel manager in settings to fix it. tick box had been changed to floating. doesn't look exactly like it did before but is fixed to bottom and internet works again.

 

Arrrrrrggggghh!!! It happened to me again. Two weeks later after initially doing a system restore + complete live update.

What is triggering this? This behavior is quite vexing. My Aspire One usage is very pedestrian; I'm not an experimenter.
The only "special" considerations I remotely think of as possibilities are the following: I leave the battery pack out and use the electrical power exclusively. The second is that I have FireFox set to use 0 mb of cache. I have 1gb of memory in my Aspire One machine.

With no battery - perhaps my wife is physically unplugging the machine before it has shut down, despite my warnings not to do this, and Linpus has not finished writing to disk, hence it gets corrupted. Not likely, I'm sure. Incidentally, the computer keeps track of time fine, pre and post corruption, so the internal battery must be fine.

With no cache in Firefox, plus zero physical disk cache setting (set that way for performance reasons), perhaps that is somehow corrupting the operating environment. I know - not likely. Basically all I use the computer for is to watch Hulu.com streaming videos while hooked up to my big screen TV.

As you can read, I'm really grasping at straws for identifying the problem. It's quite annoying. I'm not looking forward to incident #3.