Originally posted on September 22, 2007 @ 6:58 am
A couple of days ago, my sister called me up looking for a particular document she needed for her citizenship application. She left the said document in my care and now she wanted me to send her the document. She also asked me to have the document scanned so I can send her a copy while waiting for the actual document to reach her through Fedex.
I couldn’t make my scanner work so I decided to visit a computer services shop and have the document scanned. Everything went smoothly and uneventfully — that is, until I went home and plugged in the flash drive I used to save the image file in the shop. The moment I inserted the flash drive my browser popped up and this weird message from “jayker” appeared on the page. I thought it was just some random pop-up ad and proceeded to email the file to my sister. But when I rebooted my laptop the first thing that popped up when I got to the Windows desktop was the same “jayker” message on my browser! I got virus from the flash drive itself without me even opening a single file. Apparently, this virus takes advantage of the autorun feature of flash drives in order to embed itself into a computer. It then copies itself to other computers or any other drives connected to the infected computer. The virus is believed to have originated in the Philippines. This virus is really annoying and since the level of infection is not yet that high, your antivirus software will most likely not detect or clean it yet.
Fortunately, there is a workaround. You can remove the virus on your own but it will take some knowledge of DOS and dealing with the Windows registry to do this. Just refer to the instructions posted on this site.