13 Mar 2005 garym   » (Master)

So like, there's this message on my machine, mild panic, can you call me back, s'real serious; it's early, it's sunday, but hey, what are friends for? I call him up.

"What do you know about spyware and viruses?" begins a long story of a desktop machine, Windows of course, left in a utility room, used by nearly everybody in the department but officially the property of maintenance, the co-op kid hits an alarm, You've got SPYWARE! -- the machine is dispatched at once to IT-Central

long pause

Central comes back, none-too-happy, having found oodles of questionable material in various folders, the sort they'd rather not find on machines with such visibility, and the axe gets poised over the official registrants of the network node.

"So, like, how could that stuff have got in there? When the co-op kid found it, we saw the download thing just whirring along, pause, whirring again over and over -- is this what that stuff does? Download porn over and over?"

Yes, it seems they have a website-filtre, how quaint, and then they also quite freely allow Hotmail accounts to click on any arbitrary attachments, so 2 and 2 together it's pretty easy to plot a dozen courses for how this machine arrived in the present state but ...

if you ask me, and you did, I don't know much about what's what and who does which in the virus spystuffs or what's possible or practical in the post-mortem sleuthing of the Compromised DOS Machine, but if you ask me, there is no excuse for avoidable situations: the real idiot they should fry is the dunce who chose to loose an insecure O/S into an accessible unsupervised location with open full-priviledge access to 'untrusted' websites ...

but I don't suppose that's the 'expert advice' they want to hear.

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