…if this Paul Thurrott guy got hit with the same Trojan Horse that I’ve been dealing with since this morning. If he had, I sympathize.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a blood-soaked revenge to plan out.
(Via Brad DeLong)
Moe
PS: I am in a sufficiently grumpy mood as to not be looking forward to yet another installment in the Mac/PC wars. You Have Been Warned.
I am in a sufficiently grumpy mood as to not be looking forward to yet another installment in the Mac/PC wars. You Have Been Warned.
Okay… but all of this could have been solved if you’d just run Linux! (ducking and running…)
Moe:
This isn’t a techie place, but I’d appreciate a short report on the symptoms of the problem and what you think you might have done to get infected (opened an attachment, etc.).
My ‘other’ computer sorta died and I dont’ know why, and a friend has unexplained major slowdowns.
thx.
“This isn’t a techie place, but I’d appreciate a short report on the symptoms of the problem and what you think you might have done to get infected (opened an attachment, etc.).”
God-damned popup ads independent of the sites that I visit and something called Lycos Sidesearch that sidebars whenever I use Google or Yahoo. Can’t get rid of the f*cking things, either: McAfree can see them, but they’re write-protected now, so it can’t remove, clean or sequester them – and I don’t have the skills to do it myself (to be honest, I don’t even know if the pop-ups and Lycos are related. All I know is, McAfree detected a Trojan and then it all went pear-shaped). So, right now I’m stuck.
But it’ll be a cold day in hell before I use Lycos. Ever.
If you’re getting redirected to Lycos, then it sounds like you’ve got Gator or something similar. Ad-Aware (which you can download for free from download.com) should be able to take care of it.
Two recommendations: one, don’t ever use Internet Explorer ever again. Mozilla Firefox isn’t nearly as vulnerable to the vast majority of malware out there on the web. Two, install a personal firewall on your machine; I use Kerio. In addition to protecting you from inbound attacks, that’ll allow you program-by-program outbound access as well.
Apologies if you’ve already done all of this.
Tried Ad-Aware… call me nuts, but I think that I can see the improvement in performance (I seem to have had a lot of gunk in my system). Your other two suggestions will be looked into as time and funds permit, but have an ObWi Good Commenter Cookie (a time-honored tradition that I just made up). 🙂
Funds shouldn’t be an issue; both Firefox and Kerio are free. (Well, Kerio has a non-free version, but all it adds is a bunch of stuff that you’ll already cover if you’re running Firefox and Ad-Aware.) All told, it should take you maybe 20 minutes to set everything up (although I don’t know if you have broadband or not). You’ll never look back.
Just to be clear, it’s not a platform superiority issue. It is an installed user base issue. This is much the same sort of monoculture that can lead, in agriculture, to massive crop failures when disease strikes.
Lets assume Windows has a 90% online installed user base and, for the sake of argument, lets say 1/9 of those users have up-to-date virus software. A virus sent to a valid email address then has an 80% chance of hitting a vulnerable Windows box. After the next jump, the viability of the virus within the population is still 64%. After four jumps, 32% of computers in that level of the total network (which grows geometrically with each jump) are infected. If we assume an average of 5 unique, valid email addresses per computer, after four jumps something like 1364 computers are infected (out of 3905 potential targets in the complete network).
Now, suppose we had a truly competitive operating system market, and Windows was holding at, say 40% installed user base, with 1 out of 9 systems (36% of the total population) protected. On the second jump, the virus has only a 13% chance of infecting any given host in the total potential network. By four jumps, the chances of viability of the virus on any given target is down to 0.6% (remember, this includes otherwise vulnerable computers that have been shut out of the network by immune computers). Total infected computers (out of 3905 potential hosts in the network): 41 (well, 41.27, to be precise–we are talking about probabilities here).
Obviously, this is a quite simplistic model using made-up numbers. It also doesn’t factor in systems that might be protected from the virus’s growth pattern by one system only to be infected by another system (this will increase the infection rates in both scenarios), nor does it consider how the growth pattern is affected by its own choking of network resources and user or admin behavior in direct response to infection (which will undoubtedly close the gap a bit). However, I think it serves as a crude demonstration of just what a powerful effect the lack of competition in the OS market has on security.
And don’t forget, this represents not just machines plagued with annoying or destructive software, but also massive amounts of unproductive network traffic. This adds up to a significant economic burden, so say nothing of a giant Achilles’ heel that could be exploited for strategic ends by malicious actors anywhere in the world. I find the seeming lack of attention from our elected officials profoundly disturbing, considering the information industry is now the heart of our economy.
Oh, and I welcome any corrections or clarifications to my math; I would be genuinely shocked to find that it is without flaw.