Flashback, macbook pro and my external hard drive

[morphandmoi]

Hi and first let me apologize if I'm posting this in the wrong place...

I have a MacBook pro (10.6.7) and heard about the flashback virus in April. Immediately I checked my mac and, though I use Norton and it’s usually pretty good, flashback seemed to take everyone by surprise. I ran F Secure and found and removed flashback from my mac. Also I disabled Java on my mac and only use when necessary. I have an external hard drive that I use regularly because my mac is pretty full. Everything that’s important is on my HDD. Because I knew that I needed to back up my external HDD I bought a new drive and backed up all of my stuff from my mac and from the HDD onto it. When I plugged in my new HDD recently, norton ran a scan and detected 4 problems: all flashback. I want to check my old HDD for flashback but the norton virus scan doesn’t seem to work properly. Three times I have tried to scan my HDD and after many hours it looks like the progress bar has reached the end but it continues to scan and shows that it is scanning more files than exist. For examples, it states that my HDD has something like 2 million files but right now it’s scanning file number 3 million+. I’ve run other flashback detection software on my mac and my mac appears to be clean but I’m really scared that my old HDD with everything on it may be contaminated. And norton doesn’t seem to be any help with scanning. How can I check just my external HDD for flashback and viruses? All of the flashback detection software appears to just check my mac. Also, if my old HDD is infected how can I save all of my files? I thought I was doing the right thing by using norton and also by backing up my backup and I’m really scared. If anyone could help me I’d be so grateful.

Thank you so much in advance!

 

[Mal]

First, Flashback is not a virus, it's a trojan horse. That's particular relevant here, because it doesn't spread by itself. It doesn't copy itself either on your computer or to anywhere else. Your external hard drive can't be "infected" because it doesn't that've any capability of infecting anything.

Second, get rid of Norton as quickly as possible. It's the worst piece of junk you'll ever encounter on the Mac. Anti virus software isn't necessary on a Mac, although if you absolutely insist on running it, ClamXav is the least problematic that I've seen, if you turn off the real time scanning, which isn't needed.

jW