When I become King of the World the creation of malware and viruses will be punishable by death. Drawn and quartered is too good for them. I spent three hours cleaning up a computer this morning and I wasn't even looking at porn.
That is all.
When I become King of the World the creation of malware and viruses will be punishable by death. Drawn and quartered is too good for them. I spent three hours cleaning up a computer this morning and I wasn't even looking at porn.
That is all.
Actually, the porn sites are some of the cleanest around. They learned a long time ago that screwing up people's computers hurts their bottom line. Now there are still some around that are unscrupulous, but those are mostly in Eastern Europe.
Most of the malware/adware are now targeted to more commonly visited sites like search engines, social networking sites or ad-delivery services. Which is why I refuse to allow ads to show on my computer, period. NoScript and Ad-Block are always turned on and knock on wood, I've not had any issues with malware for quite some time.
The fact that new attack vectors are showing up in some of the BS add-on apps for Facebook/MySpace/Bebo just proves that the jack-wagons are paying closer attention to browser and site usage and the average user than the site owners themselves.
If you need to play a game, don't do it on Facebook.
I think he meant cleaning up in a more literal sense. Either that, or there's simply no hope for my filthy mind.
turboswede wrote: The fact that new attack vectors are showing up in some of the BS add-on apps for Facebook/MySpace/Bebo just proves that the jack-wagons are paying closer attention to browser and site usage and the average user than the site owners themselves. If you need to play a game, don't do it on Facebook.
FB in general seems to be a popular target/trojan horse. Can't tell you how many fake FB e-mails I get. Too bad for Fb that they get saddled with all of that.
I am sure that the billions of dollars make the FB people feel better...
Well, and to be honest, they are targeting the, how do I say this?
less tech savvy internet users
Basically all of the mouth breathing people that cause many to avoid places like FB are easy fodder as they just click on random links, etc without paying attention to their password complexity, password age or their system's security.
Not too mention their own personal security by posting that they are going out of town for a week, etc without making sure that only their close friends can see this, opening themselves up for theft, etc.
some kind of worm/malware posing as antivirus had been making the rounds in the last couple weeks.
4 workstations at work got hit, then I got hit at home.
A particularly nasty strain that changed IE, Firefox, and Opera into a bad proxy mode so I couldn't surf anywhere, then deployed a popup that said it was a virus scanner and that I had a virus. and to 'click here' for help. It also locked IE 'options' from the registry, even tho I use an admin-level login on my home system.
With no browsers working, if I were less savvy, I might just have clicked on that fake antivirus box... in 1988. -_-.
I'm running clamwin, spybot with resident, and full activex restrictions and tough soft firewall settings too. So it worked its way in pretty well, considering.
[[]]
I found the salt whatever it was in the temp folder, and used the shredder in Spybot to basically destroy the entire tempfolder contents.
It also seemed to deploy using Java, so I uninstalled and shredded Java.
Blacklisted all processes unregistered before yesterday. Reinstalled Java, fixed all the browsers network settings, and hopefully got off relatively painless....
FB got canned off all my systems over a year ago because of the crap on there. This one came in while searching for a pdf file for a wiring diagram at work. Unfortunately I hadn't updated the virus and malware software in a while and it slipped through the cracks. Basically the same thing Mallard described. It took it less than five minutes to lock the system down where it wouldn't do anything. I ended up starting in safe mode with networking and updated AVG and Malwarebytes. After a through scan from both of them I got all of it. It's just a pita to not be able to trust any site. When even the sites run by multi-billion dollar companies like Stanley get infected you know the little guys don't stand a chance.
FB is one of the cleanest things around... but it is home to some of the dirtiest things around. Facebook is like a Libertarian with Herpes; they live a clean life, but its up to others to protect themselves from your viruses. (and I'm a Libertarian)
Much of the problem with porn is that the less tech savvy (demographically speaking) tend to go for the occasional free porn sites instead of paying for premium services. Those free sites are often just fronts for malware. They have realized that people will jump through a lot of hoops for free porn, and in the process they unwittingly let junk past the firewall.
That is why I never view porn on the internets. 
madmallard wrote: some kind of worm/malware posing as antivirus had been making the rounds in the last couple weeks. 4 workstations at work got hit, then I got hit at home. A particularly nasty strain that changed IE, Firefox, and Opera into a bad proxy mode so I couldn't surf anywhere, then deployed a popup that said it was a virus scanner and that I had a virus. and to 'click here' for help. It also locked IE 'options' from the registry, even tho I use an admin-level login on my home system. With no browsers working, if I were less savvy, I might just have clicked on that fake antivirus box... in 1988. -_-. I'm running clamwin, spybot with resident, and full activex restrictions and tough soft firewall settings too. So it worked its way in pretty well, considering. [[]] I found the salt whatever it was in the temp folder, and used the shredder in Spybot to basically destroy the entire tempfolder contents. It also seemed to deploy using Java, so I uninstalled and shredded Java. Blacklisted all processes unregistered before yesterday. Reinstalled Java, fixed all the browsers network settings, and hopefully got off relatively painless....
wish I understood even 10% of what you said....
oh well the only thing I have going for me (spy/malware/virus wise ) is my Apple... doesn't seem to get hit as often as the PC folk...
I have yet to get anything since I been running a Linux distro. But, from what I have read, it's hard to be able to get anything to load into root, unlike Windows, which allows pretty much anything to load in and take control.
AquaHusky wrote: I have yet to get anything since I been running a Linux distro. But, from what I have read, it's hard to be able to get anything to load into root, unlike Windows, which allows pretty much anything to load in and take control.
Not surprising.....your stated reasons are correct, but they are only part of why you haven't gotten any malware. The biggest factor is that few people write malware for a platform that is not widely adopted.
Use OpenBSD. You'll be more secure than Linux....both because it is written with secure coding in mind, and because nobody else is using it, so there's very little malware written for it. 
BTW, having a program run as root and screw with the OS is not the only problem in the world....Most people care about their data a lot - photos of grand kids, financial records, etc. A malicious program that can only touch files you have permission to can still ruin your day...
In reply to JoeyM:
I have been wanting to try OpenBSD, but I want to build a new CPU for it first to get the most out of it. And, it is also harder to get malicious code to get into a Linux distro because you have millions of eyes going over everything and a very close knit community and the code wouldn't have a chance as the programmers would have a patch out and about quite quickly.
I picked up one that had bugs eating the screen.. I kept the screen saver
AquaHusky wrote: In reply to JoeyM: I have been wanting to try OpenBSD, but I want to build a new CPU for it first to get the most out of it. And, it is also harder to get malicious code to get into a Linux distro because you have millions of eyes going over everything and a very close knit community and the code wouldn't have a chance as the programmers would have a patch out and about quite quickly.
Open source definitely benefits from "many eyes", BUT the competency of those eyes is important. I'd put Theo's (i.e. OpenBSD's) attention to secure coding above a couple thousand other people's eyes. If a program uses a function that has the potential to be less secure, program gets rewritten. (Or, the function gets rewritten)
Honestly, though, I'd say it's nice for firewalls and honeypots. If you don't love computers for the sake of computers, you probably don't want it as a desktop OS.....too many interoperability headaches for my taste. I don't like computers anymore.
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