If you were wondering where the hell I’ve been the past week, my computer got a virus. A nasty bastard called “Virtumonde”. It’s harder to eradicate than a group of Mormon teenagers going door-to-door in your neighborhood. It’s self-replicating, multiple instance and over 100 different appearances in processes, registry entries and obscure .DLL files. Most virus scanners stop it from entering the system, but none have any surefire ways of digging it out once it’s in there. The one guy who does offer a piece of software solely for its removal wants your unborn children as payment. And is a flaming prick about it. I spent about 3 days chasing my tail with this one, before I finally said screw it. This is probably the one time my trigger-happy nature in computer science actually pays off…I will wipe a hard drive faster than a married man caught on MySpace chatting up his 18 year old babysitter.
Which is exactly what I did.
It really didn't do much damage at all, other than mildly inconvenience me, and my computer was due for a good system wiping and clean reinstall. I use about 20 different DVD ripping, creating and burning programs, as well as file converters, email and such, so a complete reinstall off a fresh wipe will take about 2 days, depending on how I want to play it.
So I should be back to writing and posting soon, after I trim the boat with my computer, and fix the firewall. I had to make a decision between AVG and Zone Alarm today…I went with Zone Alarm. AVG is also a great program, but I appreciate the ease of use and depth of system scan Zone Alarm gives me, as well as the flexibility to change jobs in midstream if I want to. It’s just preference really, AVG has a great reputation in the industry for firewall/antivirus, if a little too over-zealous with the false-positives after a system scan.
Sooo...You’re all probably out there wondering how I got this in the first place, and if I’m so tech-savvy why it slipped past my defenses if I was running an antivirus program in the first place (which I was, mind you).
Ain’t Telling!
4 comments:
ah, sometimes that shit just gets through. And Virtumonde is a tricky and sly little devil. I have had to disinfect that one a couple of times myself.
Truthfully, the only way to be sure a computer is fully cleaned of a virus is to flatten it and rebuild anyway.
In addition to antivirus, if you run your computer in an unelevated account and only run those apps elevated that need to be you can prevent 90% of this stuff even without antivirus.
That can be a bit of work though.
Okay, guys. You're scaring me. Any idea where you picked that virus up?
SS
Uh-huh. A good friend of mine said "Install this" and I took his word for it that it was fine. Actually, he didn't know either, and had been suffering network slowdown for MONTHS when I explained the virus to him.
...After beating the stuffing out of him with a baseball bat for giving me infected software.
Honestly, though, you can snag it before it does damage, just make sure you have an up-to-date virus scanner.
"…I will wipe a hard drive faster than a married man caught on MySpace chatting up his 18 year old babysitter.
Which is exactly what I did."
Come again?
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