There's some bad stuff out there...

The machines we love to hate

Moderator: Wiz Feinberg

Ray Minich
Posts: 6431
Joined: 22 Jul 2003 12:01 am
Location: Bradford, Pa. Frozen Tundra

There's some bad stuff out there...

Post by Ray Minich »

(Don't tell anybody but) I was using my corporate office PC to do some web surfing on knots, the kind mountain climbers use. I used Yahoo to bring up a list of candidate URL's to view. One of them has so badly corrupted my PC that even the corporate IT guys are recommending a complete rebuild of my Operating System (Win2K). This spyware/trojan/virus infection is so insidious that to get rid of it I'm gonna have to take the infected (C: ) system drive and make it a slave on another Win2K machine to be able to run eradication programs on it, if it can be repaired at all. The bad guys are getting really sharp.
Be Careful!!!<font size="1" color="#8e236b"><p align="center">[This message was edited by Ray Minich on 22 September 2005 at 02:17 PM.]</p></FONT>
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Wiz Feinberg
Posts: 6113
Joined: 8 Jan 1999 1:01 am
Location: Mid-Michigan, USA

Post by Wiz Feinberg »

Ray;
It sounds to me like your office's IT Guys were asleep at the wheel when it came to securing the LAN via firewall rules, filters, user rights (limited user accounts are the safest privileges), and locking down the security settings (disabling ActiveX and Downloads, not allowing third party extensions, among other security settings) of the workstation's browser (presumably MSIE).

If these things had been done in advance you could not have caused such damage to the OS of your workstation. By allowing you to operate with more than Limited or User privileges they opened the door to system infections.

Wiz
Ray Minich
Posts: 6431
Joined: 22 Jul 2003 12:01 am
Location: Bradford, Pa. Frozen Tundra

Post by Ray Minich »

You know what would be a neat thing to have Wiz. Some kind of nice document that gives what each of the internet settings checkboxes actually do and mean.

I didn't have admin priviliges but I guess I was in at power user level. We've also had a machine infected that was supposedly stripped of IE and totally locked down. Doesn't bode well for the network for the next few days.

BTW Wiz, this is the trojan that throws a command box at you complaining about registry entries, then sprays your screen with a big Symantec Page. Seen it yet?<font size="1" color="#8e236b"><p align="center">[This message was edited by Ray Minich on 23 September 2005 at 11:33 PM.]</p></FONT>