Enemy of Entropy

Archive for 2 January 2008

Malware Woes

2 January 2008, 11:52 pm. 2 Comments. Filed under Geekery.

A few weeks ago, my PC was some­how infected with some nasty thing that tried to turn it in to a spam­bot via dri­veby down­load. I had the cur­rent ver­sion of Syman­tec AntiVirus run­ning, set to the absolute high­est para­noia lev­els and updated daily. I also had Spy­bot Search & Destroy run­ning, again, updated daily and care­fully con­fig­ured. I had both do full sys­tem scans every day, as well as keep­ing them memory-​​resident at all times.

Nei­ther pro­gram ever gave so much as a peep. In fact, when I found the orig­i­nal file that was to blame and checked it man­u­ally with Syman­tec AV, it passed as though it were as inno­cent as a babe. If I hadn’t had the antivirus soft­ware con­fig­ured to show me an icon in the systray when it was check­ing out­go­ing mail, who knows when I would have real­ized that the sys­tem was com­pro­mised? As it was, I knew within sec­onds. (Hey, I notice “out­go­ing mail” when my email pro­gram isn’t even open.) I ended up pulling out the eth­er­net cable to stop com­mu­ni­ca­tions ’til the sys­tem was clean.
Read on…

 

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