After the Happy Hour (recounted in lovely stick figure form here), I
grabbed Snay's computer to take a look at delousing it. His
machine is not a badly configured one at all:
Dell Dimension 4600
Pentium 4 Processor with HyperThreading
1 GB of RAM
40 GB Hard Drive
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro
The next day, I fire it up in the office but I do not put it on our
network. Well, the machine is incredibly sluggish, and opening up
Task Manager shows me that there are at least 20 to 30 processes
starting with the same executable name. Obviously, a malware
infestation gone bad. Moreover, the antivirus software on this
machine is out of date, and it is missing some critical updates.
Wonderful.
It took some work, but the following image shows just how bad it was:
I was able to flex my geeky muscles and get everything back to working order. In addition to the usual malware tools, I had to whip out the Knoppix-STD and BartPE. Simply put, his machine was in such a bad state I had to boot another operating system to delete stuff.
So, in the interest of publicly shaming Snay to be a bit more security
concious, I am blogging about what he needs to do from now on.
- Maintain an up-to-date virus scanner, downloading updates daily.
- Download and install all critical updates, letting Windows do it automatically.
- Use Firefox, and do not click on random items--especially if they have anything to do with penis enlargement.
- Invest in a software firewall--ZoneAlarm, for example. Windows XP SP2 contains one, but I would suggest a more full-featured one for you.
Most of all, just be careful out there! With some simple
precautions, I would have never had to delouse your machine.
;-) Oh, and F you Mac meatheads!
12:30:30 PM 
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