January 22, 2012

I should probably be business as usual but...

So here's the deal, I write articles in advance for the most part unless something comes up. Right now I've got 2 fully complete articles and 6 more that have a concept and some work done. The idea is to keep a steady flow of communication to you the followers. However these last few days I've been M.I.A. and of course you're going to ask why if you're seriously interested so I thought I'd take your regular post to inform you of why I've been silent.

The last few days I've been dealing with a nasty bit of malware. Google chrome wouldn't start, and Firefox would hang in less than a minute. A few of my other programs were also out of commission, and while the system itself wasn't having any sort of sluggishness it was obviously a serious problem in relation to my daily work. After a long 3 to 4 day process of finding out what it was causing the problem, depending on how you count the days, I finally traced it and removed it. Honestly figuring out what the culprit was turned out to be significantly harder than dealing with it. The malware was using remnants of an old program I apparently didn't uninstall properly. The product in question is CORE Impact, a security testing system of all things. Now the system appears to be up and running again now that I've properly dealt with the malware and taken preventative measures against future malware.

To the designer, thank you for the challenge and try harder in the future. The likelihood the designer will ever read this is negligible, and the malware may or may not be designed to find loopholes instead of that specific program which means even if the designer reads it he may not know it was him or her. So it's an open message to all malware designers. I now have that much more reason to run dual boot on my next system. I could create an image load system but meh I don't think so, I'd much rather just run linux when I'm on the net / regular surfing and windows for work and games.

In truth there's not much I can't do in linux and I do love various KDE based systems, I have several live USB's I already use, I just generally don't use them at home. So, as an amendment to my future build, I'll be making a dual boot OS default, I won't have to bother with USB at all, it's going on the drive from the start.

What issues have you had with your system lately? What's your favorite security setup? Somehow this got by VIPRE, and ad aware, It also wasn't picked up by scans from avira, norton, spybot, nod, and various other programs I quickly grabbed and tried, in truth malwarebytes actually got it where all other programs failed me, I'm making a nicely sized donation and buying full premium copy.
If you haven't heard about Vipre, I can't quite remember who technically owns it, I think sunbelt?, anyway I tracked down my old firewall hoping for an upgrade. I used to love kerio personal firewall and didn't really like komodo, so I found it changed its name around and got bought out etc now it's not even a stand alone, just part of the Vipre suite, which so far has done nicely for my anti everything, my scans in everything else turned up entirely clean until malwarebytes barely found something in a full system scan.

Update your security, and have a great week.

also, my other blog Kaironaught is updated almost on time so you don't see a copy of this there.

3 comments:

  1. Thanks for the advice. take care :)

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  2. those malware hits can be the worst. especially the ones that mess with the internet. then you can't look up how to easily fix it. i usually run mbam once a week just as a check

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