The other day 7/19/02 my computer started typing on its own, sentences that didn't make sense. My Norton Antivirus 2002 indicated in the report section that the hacktool.flooder virus was downloaded on June 1, 2002 and it had quarantined it. Is this that virus that is doing this? I read the message archives here and found a similar problem, and that person was told it was his speech recognition or mic that was causing it. We did plug our mic in for the first time about a week ago. I have since unplugged it. Any ideas? When I scan Norton now it says no viruses are detected.

I didn't find much info at the Norton site but found this at Trend Micro I hope might help Good luck TROJ_KATIEN.A Aliases: Trojan.Win32.Katien, Hacktool.Flooder, KATIEN.A, KATIEN

hi stephanie, are you by chance using icq? if so then you may have the trojan called Flooder.W32.ICQ.Zap its a Trojan used by hackers to flood the systems of ICQ users with messages. This information overload will cause the server to disconnect the user for exhausting the server resources. Flooder.W32.ICQ.Zap is written in Visual C++ v5.0, and its size is 45568 bytes. Symptoms of Infection In order to prevent themselves from being disconnected, the attacker loads another, parallel session and starts sending pings (automatic response requests) to the targeted user through these two channels. The user under attack will respond with twice as many pongs (automatic responses to pings), which will cause an 'Excess flood' situation, thus disconnecting them for overloading the server resources. Means of Infection Flooder.W32.ICQ.Zap runs under Windows in an MS-DOS window. you can get rid of it by running the Panda online virus detector. i don't have the address but i know you can link to it from www.thepublicworks.com security section. you may also see if its DW's trojan Katien, as you can see there are so many varients of flooders. best of luck hope this helps, murve

Thanks for all your responses. I don't use ICQ Murve, thanks for the info, though. So far today since I unplugged the microphone the typing hasn't occurred again. Hopefully, that was the problem. If I am that lucky to have that be the cause, I will say that I have learned a lot this week about viruses and protecting my computer, so that's a good thing. I will never allow my antivirus software subscription to lapse again. Stephanie

murve , thought i would let you know the Flooder.W32.ICQ.Zap is a tool used by hackers . this i not installed on the victoms machine they use this tool to send mass loads of packets to the victoms system like a DOS attack.