I'm at a loss on how to explain this...
I have windoze xp with all the latest patches running on my laptop, firewalls up with 'no exceptions' ticked and AVG to protect my client from email virus and I rarely, if ever take files via external source (like USB key or whatever). In addition to AVG my ISP also virus scans my emails on the POP3 server using Nortan Symantec.
I occassionally go through my temp directory and clean out the contents and discovered a (hidden and read only) directory that had the name of a project that I worked on in 1999/2000. The thing is, the project was on an older laptop that is long gone/dead. On top of that I know 100% that I do not, nor have I ever had a directory named in that way before - nor do I have a zip file anywhere on my system that corresponds to the subdirectory in my temp directory. I mean... if the project was called Gonzo then I have a sub directory in my windows temp directory called
Temporary Directory 1 for Gonzo.zip
In there, there were a number of jar and tmp files. I removed the tmp and jar files but before I removed the one and only text file I begun to question why the temp directory existed at all, never mind the contents.
I know jar files are associated with java - I have removed all my java cache files and any java related jar file that might exist in some temporary directory and I have done a full scan with AVG and it has not found anything on my system.
The one text file I found was called newSystem.txt and it does have questions that would have related to the IT project I had back then though I cannot recall 100% if they are questions I would have written or if they were extracted from a document written by someone else.
Anyone know if I have been hacked or if some trojan might exist that might have ferreted around my machine? anyone care to offer me advice? I do my best to keep my machine clean and have my every day user as a Limited account and only use my master (admin) account to install/ remove software.
The only other thing I could find suspicious is a large 700mb temp file called =$0C490A91.t$m
Does anyone have any idea why such a file would exist? Its really driving me crazy...
Thanks!