How to get rid of a worm

Your "friend" is describing a Windows worm and having to defrag.

Both are not on or required on your Mac as it uses a different operating system that doesn't get worms or needs defragging.

Relax, your FINE!

Just use the computer like before and tell your friend he doesn't know what he's talking about. 🙂

There are no known viruses affecting OS X. If you downloaded an unknown file from an unknown site then you may have one of the two trojans in the wild. But most likely what you need to do is reinstall Snow Leopard:

Reinstall OS X without erasing the drive

Do the following:

1. Repair the Hard Drive and Permissions

Boot from your Snow Leopard Installer disc. After the installer loads select your language and click on the Continue button. When the menu bar appears select Disk Utility from the Utilities menu. After DU loads select your hard drive entry (mfgr.'s ID and drive size) from the the left side list. In the DU status area you will see an entry for the S.M.A.R.T. status of the hard drive. If it does not say "Verified" then the hard drive is failing or failed. (SMART status is not reported on external Firewire or USB drives.) If the drive is "Verified" then select your OS X volume from the list on the left (sub-entry below the drive entry,) click on the First Aid tab, then click on the Repair Disk button. If DU reports any errors that have been fixed, then re-run Repair Disk until no errors are reported. If no errors are reported click on the Repair Permissions button. Wait until the operation completes, then quit DU and return to the installer.

If DU reports errors it cannot fix, then you will need Disk Warrior and/or Tech Tool Pro to repair the drive. If you don't have either of them or if neither of them can fix the drive, then you will need to reformat the drive and reinstall OS X.

2. Reinstall Snow Leopard

If the drive is OK then quit DU and return to the installer. Proceed with reinstalling OS X. Note that the Snow Leopard installer will not erase your drive or disturb your files. After installing a fresh copy of OS X the installer will move your Home folder, third-party applications, support items, and network preferences into the newly installed system.

Download and install the Combo Updater for the version you prefer from support.apple.com/downloads/.

A computer friend of mine said I may have a worm.

Any idea how he verified that? Or did he just pull a scary sounding phrase out of the air?

That I know of, there's only one piece of malware for the Mac that could be classified as a worm, and that's Oompa-Loompa (known under various names). It spreads via iChat by actively looking looking for other iChat users, in your list of users, via Bonjour, which is its worm characteristic. Once it finds one, it pops up a message on that user's Mac to enter their admin name and password to install itself on the newly found Mac. So if you've never allowed a program to install, which asked for your admin password from out of nowhere, you don't have it.

Getting infected with Oompa-Loomps is actually fairly difficult (unless you're the type of person who installs anything that asks). A year or so ago, the number of people who were verified to have Oompa-Loompa on their Macs was a grand total of 50. And that was after it had been a know piece of malware for at least 2 years.

So, I seriously doubt you have any kind of worm on your Mac.

The computer keeps telling me that my webpages are not responding. And its getting worse. Any ideas?

Yes, reset Safari. With Safari in the foreground, go to the menu bar at the top and select Safari > Reset Safari. Turn on all check boxes, with the exception of Remove saved names and passwords, so you don't have to enter all of those again as you visit sites you had set up to remember that data.

He also said I may have to defrag my system.

That won't do a darn thing in relation to your issue. It's rarely even necessary to do that in OS X.

Hi,

It may help if you tell where the web pages that your describe as "yours" are being loaded from.

Are these uploaded to a server on the internet somewhere that you have (free or paid service) ?

Or are they ones created on your Mac and in your Home Folder > Sites ? (There are other places you can keep Web Pages on your Mac but this one is the most likely).

9:54 PM Tuesday; October 11, 2011

 G4/1GhzDual MDD (Leopard 10.5.8)
 MacBookPro 2Gb( 10.6.8)
 Mac OS X (10.6.8),
"Limit the Logs to the Bits above Binary Images."  No, Seriously

I hope you didn't Cut and Paste that like boilerplate. You'd better have re-typed it from scratch. Otherwise you may be attacked by the boilerplate police. Penalties are severe:

Just to complete the picture:

You may find this User Tip on Viruses, Trojan Detection and Removal, as well as general Internet Security and Privacy, useful:

https://discussions.apple.com/docs/DOC-2435

But how will that fix the OP's described problem?

Kappy wrote:

But how will that fix the OP's described problem?

I knew you be on this fast with a paste so I didn't bother. 😝

And, you're always right. 😝

Boilerplate Police? Up theirs!

I wrote the User Tip! 👿