Re: The Bad-ass Virus.
It’s Virtumonde. I may have had it forever, because I never, ever load IE, and it doesn’t affect the latest version of Firefox.
However, I’ve probably been suffering serious performance degradation because of it… which could be heartening, as things might run a little faster now.
Alas, the fixes tried before didn’t work, and if you look it up on wikipedia, you’ll see why – this one is a byotch of a trojan horse.
At wiki’s advice, I downloaded the only app that seems to do a bang-up job, Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware on the work laptop, ported it over, and went to town with it a few times.
Things seem to be clean now, so I’ve taken the opportunity to finally update my system. Which, yes, required me to turn on Auto Updates, AND to install IE 7, and frankly, I’m fucking pissed about that. Next computer I buy’s a dual-booting Mac, ’cause I’m sick of being treated like a child by my own Operating System*.
* note: I’m aware that the Apple OS treats you like a child too – it just does so in different ways.
Funny, I just downloaded Malwarebytes last night and ran it to get rid of a (different) trojan I got also because I’ve not updated Windows in a bajillion years. Heh. :)
freaky.
that was the same one I struggled to get off my new to me laptop last week……
as well as the other 102 virus/trojan/what have you on it…
I better get it logged in an updated.
Viva los Linux!
I had to boot into Windows the other day to install a stupid scanning app for my HP printer (500 MB JUST TO BE ABLE TO SCAN, srsly), and I almost went crazy.
On the other hand, my work box runs XP and we seem to get along okay, mostly by virtue of the fact that I’ve never changed anything about it since I set it up (except to double the RAM..ever tried to run XP on 256MB? Eeeeeek!). We still hate each other, but I think it has a version of gender-identity disorder: I treat it like a Linux box (i.e. hardly ever turning it off, etc.), and it loves it, the kinky bastard. ;)
*chuckle* Hot.
The problem, of course, is that Linux still does not run every application. Specifically, none of the Linux variants will run Premiere CS3 (or CS4, which is out now), though there are other windows-only apps I use. I’ve got to have a computer that’s compatible with my work environment, y’know?
My other irritation with Linux is that I have grown past my desire to immediately modify every single setting and configuration, and in that respect I find it more frustrating than the other two major OS’s. You’d think we’d have an intuitive OS by now, but even Ubuntu (which I like) otherwise) has a frustrating amount of post-installation work to do.
Hm, I find Ubuntu pretty easy to use out-of-the-box, but there are post-installation configuration packages to download (mine installs Firefox + extentions, and a bunch of common software and settings) — but I won’t argue it’s got a little ways to go. Then again, I can’t use a Windows box without at LEAST a full day of fscking with it first (yeah yeah, bad joke), so it’s not really any better.
I feel your pain about the software…I would have expunged ‘Doze from my life years ago, if Linux would just get a decent WYSIWYG html editor going…argh.
That used to be one of our favorite viruses in the Geek Squad. We’d see that sucker at least once a week, but it was fairly easy to remove then. I recently ran into it again on a friend’s PC and it seems to be a bit more resilient now. After running Malwarebytes, AdAware, Spybot, and every other program in my anti-malware cocktail, I still couldn’t get rid of it. The OS ended up being too corrupt to recover so I just backed it up, wiped it, and started over. Fun stuff.
If the Windoze apps you need run ok under virtualization, I highly recommend skipping the dual-boot setup and just running Windows under VMWare Fusion or some such. It’s fairly easy to clone and roll back virtual machines, so if your windows install gets a virus, you just blow it away and go back to a non-corrupt one.
As for Mac OS X treating you like a kid in its own way — yes it does, but it also has some Unix under the hood to keep us geeks happy. =)