Virus in Database

[Manfred]

When I imported my existing v3 database into PGO v4 my virus scanner (Microsoft Security Essentials) triggered and indicated a Trogan/worm in the transfer to the new db3 format.

I assume this was a direct file to file copy, perhaps I'm wrong.
I manually scanned the original file and it came up clean.

How would you explain this ?

[Wilson Logan]

Hi Manfred,

Very interesting...

So, the virus checker does not trigger when you manually scan the ygroups.mdb file but does trigger when you manually scan the new V4 database?

Thats very odd. The PGO V3 database does not contain executable objects, only the text of the messages. Even when it was possible to send pictures and attachments with Yahoo (pre-2001) the attachments were held in a separate folder, not on the database. In fact the database cannot hold pictures or files as it is set up only to contain string (text) data.

However, V4 database can handle pictures and attachments (as Binary Large Objects). It may be possible that there is a message in your V3 database which is a virus or trojan but it is held as plain text within the body of the message (you would see it as a large string of nonsense in the PGO message viewer).

Once you move this message to the V4 database, the V4 database knows it is a file and not just text so it is exposed to the virus checker.

I think it is safe inside the V4 database. There is no way to activate it from inside V4 database. Although V4 can accept files and pictures there is currently no functionality to access them.

I would be very interested to have a copy of the original V3 database file in zip format.

Is it a large file?

Cheers,

Wilson.