Saturday, September 26, 2009

956 MB of Malware - One machine - Three Days...

...and then there was more...

Up at 10 AM as usual; there is a request for service from Geek CSI - me. Arranged to be there at 6PM for a two hour initial service call; left at 9PM with the laptop in my hands. No WAY to get this one quick; my limited software has me working things out the hard way. Forums, friends, and freeware! It was nice to have it home with me in the PC/Isolation Room. Spent the night and early morning hours wading through hacker crap.They are cyber-terrorists and should be treated with the same
contempt as they have for our right to peace! No mercy, no clemency, period!

I don't have a silver bullet; what I have is DECADES of experience with terror, and a PC skill-set second to none I know. Am I the best? Probably not but, my machine has run for two years without a Restore/Recovery option. No safety net but me. I can not allow it, or them, to take me out of the loop.

My Vista HB 3GB P4, 2 GB RAM, 160GB on-board, 1/2TB xtrnl HDD has learned to sit up and beg! Looking forward to upgrading Vista on this one and jumping on Win7 with another. Long live Micro$$oft! My bread is buttered...

That would give me 98SE, XP pro, Vista, and Win7 all downstairs with me :)


There are eight PCs on two conjoined networks in this household; three upstairs ( with an all-in-one and a photo printer) and five (plus my own all-in-one) down here with me. I look after it all. The laptops have Wi-Fi built into them of course and one mid tower in the basement runs from a wireless USB adapter. The rest are hard lined for best performance.

I'm good. I am also worn out from making things work on-the-fly as I encountered new mutations and re-spawns. Multiple anti-spyware and anti-virus/malware apps finally killed it long enough for me to "secure" the customers chosen browser (IE). By locking parts of it down with IE7Pro and the rest with Spybot I stopped the bastards cold. Juggling web access with flash transfers to keep things relatively under control I accomplished what the "big boys" with all their toys - could not do.
Old school troubleshooting
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"There's no reason to treat software any differently from other products. Today Firestone can produce a tire with a single systemic flaw and they're liable, but Microsoft can produce an operating system with multiple systemic flaws discovered per week and not be liable. This makes no sense, and it's the primary reason security is so bad today."
Bruce Schneier, Cryptogram, 16/04/2002

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"In studying the history of the human mind one is impressed again and again by the fact that the growth of the mind is the widening of the range of consciousness, and that each step forward has been a most painful and laborious achievement. One could almost say that nothing is more hateful to man than to give up even a particle of his unconsciousness. Ask those who have tried to introduce a new idea!"
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ABOUT: The conception and birth of V.O.I.D.

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V.O.I.D. evolved in my sleep; becoming a waking dream which was then compounded by intuitive leaps. Formerly known as "w2w_Webfly's World" this site became the centerpiece of my socio-economic network. As such, the webfly persona no longer served as an iconoclastic representation of what I do here in CyberVille. I am still w2w_Webfly on many sites and will stay such for a while; perhaps gradually shifting screen names to w2wScribe. An attempt to establish an AIM profile registered the name but, not the profile. Ready, fire AIM.
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