I
always accepted users comments that they didn’t know how they got infested
because its generally the truth. I didn’t understand how they couldn’t have
noticed that their machine had slowed, but even on campus the network can get
frustratingly slow at times. Now that it happened to me, I can tell you one
way to get it. Using MSIE, browse to a recommended site from a news aggregator
who has never let you down in the past. After thirty seconds or so your
machine slows to the point that any tech knows it’s been infested. There are
thousands of sites that are harboring mal-ware scripts. I know I should have
been using Firefox, but for some reason I was in IE.
For
my home machine running online scans offered by both www.antivirus.com (Trend Micro) and http://www.kaspersky.com/virusscanner
(Kaspersky Labs) cleaned up the problem. While not requiring much interaction
from me, the scan process did take hours.
Here
at work I used to trust HitmanPro II http://www.hitmanpro.nl/hitmanpro/
but even it hasn’t been catching the latest script installed malware.
Best
practice as of today – Run Firefox or Opera with scripting turned off. I was
amazed at the number of everyday sites that require scripting to do simple
things that could have been better coded. Now I generally recover data from
another profile and re-image the machine.
Good
luck.
Don
Bosman
Information
Technologist
Libraries,
Michigan State University
100 Library
East Lansing, MI 48824-1048
[log in to unmask]
(517) 432-6123 ext 233
Fax (517) 432-8374