Fixing Microsoft, for home use.

I have used MS products since MSDOS 3.01 and have continued to make advances as the software became available. I have versions of just about everything along the way, including Beta Tester Vista and now Windows 7 Beta too. I use for the most part WinXP and Professional, more than anything else.

Back in Oct 2008, I noticed something not running right on the machine, an AMD 3000 CPU machine, Raid drives and all build for surviving a catatrosphic issue. This was the back-up that I had rebuilt and saved multiple drives of information for 14 years of business. Not something you want to lose. I noticed that after coming back from Halifax for a couple days, that something, was very wrong. The machine was patched and on Auto update. But low and behold, it had multiple viri. It had a good scanner and was also auto-updating. I did a non-network install of the updates and set it to scan, it started to find problems, multiples.

I spent multiple hours going though logs and figuring out where the infection started. It looked like the problem, was with any device that has a USB FlashDrive memory. With that criteria, I went through all of the machines, all pens, everything I could find looking for the guilty problem.

I found hints of it from the scans of the pens and from the access log to the networks and which user name was being used. The problem was that someone had appropriated someone elses user/pass and was using it to SURF, in the middle of the night. This would not have been a problem, except this second person had given themselves ADMIN, in order to install a game, and NEVER bothered to change it back. This looked like THE HOLE, into the system.

In Nov, I pulled the rigs out on the coffee table in front of the TV and set up to install and clean things up. I wanted it on the table, cause I wanted the culprets to see how much time they had wasted of my time, to fix their problem.

In Dec, I locked the machine down, ended scripting, stopped VB, patched it before I left, had good passwords on the admin and admin accounts and left of Dec 6 for Ottawa. I never heard a peep outta anyone, until a week after I got back from Ontario. My sweetheart said that something was not right. I went back and looked, watched while she worked. AGAIN it looked like a viri at work behind the scenes.
Stuff popping over the work in progress, files missing, stuff moved and programs not working right.

Over In England, there was some news, about a worm that nailed 3.5 MIL machines over there and remarkably has the same symptoms as I see on my 2 machines. It ran on Flash devices and was hard to catch. Rats! I knew there was a figgen problem with those flash drives, I just could not find it and scans were clean, but it acted like there was a problem, and by jimininie - there was!

The WIZZ OFF is that one these machines, is mission critical. It did have all updates, it had auto-updating virus protection. It had all of the changes that I could think of to stop the problems with having open ports. And now I am working again to rebuild the machine for the 3rd time in 3 months. I don't think I will put this one back - online. I will just set it up for file serving for my sweetheart and my files and not bother having it open to the outside world.

To answer the problem with some of the other people involved, I have loaded RedHat Fedora 10 onto a P2000 with 1 gig memory. It does have Raid on it, but I don't want to mess with figuring that out right now. I just need a clean machine, on the network. They just need to surf and check email. That will do that and securely as well.

I also have Mandriva 2008 and another box which may get something like the BETA 7 again.

Cheers - David - mileage varies depending how you drive, always wear your seatbelt and look out the wind-shield.

I hope you are not wasting your time these days.