lnk exploit virus

Nibble

I live in Taiwan, and I often get messages from various friends containing some text like "find your ideal partner, check this out!" and a ".lnk" file. I've always known that they are most likely viruses, so I usually just ignore them. I thought it odd that Gmail's antivirus never finds a problem with the files, however, so I downloaded one in order to submit it to McAfee for evaluation. When I downloaded it, however, it appeared as "abcd.download" instead of "abcd.lnk", and I couldn't access it because "The process 'System' is currently accessing this file." I downloaded it with Chrome on Windows 7, and I didn't ask to execute the file. When I downloaded the same file on XP running Avira Antivir, it immediately identified it as containing an exploit called "EXP/lnk.AY.3", but it didn't have any information on the nature of the exploit.

Is my Windows 7 machine potentially infected? What can I do about it at this point? I have submitted the file to McAfee, which is the antivirus program running on that machine. Should I replace it with Avira and do a full system scan?

Seeks

Download MSSE or Avira. You might also want to boot into recovery mode and delete the file manually so that it can't be accidentally be accessed.

scrivenerjones

Nibble wrote: »

I thought it odd that Gmail's antivirus never finds a problem with the files, however, so I downloaded one in order to submit it to McAfee for evaluation.

Isn't there an e-mail address you can forward these things to, rather than having to download some dubious file to send along?

Nibble

Avira does this, but I couldn't find the option for McAfee. Actually, their entire suspicious file submission process kind of sucks. I only downloaded the file because I assumed that it couldn't do any damage unless I executed it. Apparently Windows is very nosy and it likes to check out files while I'm downloading them.

I was able to delete the file after about a minute, but I have no idea if it created any other files on my system.

|EDIT| It seems that Microsoft Malware Detection Center does not support email submissions, either, so I can't check if MSSE would be able to detect the virus on my computer. I guess I'll go with Avira for now.