So, if you are the sort of person who has a fair bit of interaction with the shady computer underworld–you know where to find a download of anything, or a way to find a crack or a serial number for anything, etc, it is almost unavoidable that at some point you’re going to step into the crap and run into a Trojan or a virus or something.<\/p>\n
Not that I am such a person, of course.<\/p>\n
On the other hand, I did just spend six hours de-virusing my laptop. This is the first time I’ve really had anything serious–and man, are those things tenacious these days: trojans that register themselves with WinLogon, kernel mode drivers to prevent you from altering the registry to unregister them, rootkits, hidden filesystems, alternate data streams, etc.<\/p>\n
Man, I wish I could just work on Linux–just for the whole “not running everything as root” thing. (That being said, I am partly to blame for this, since I did kind of fail to uncheck the “run after unzipping” checkbox. Damn it.)<\/p>\n
I have no idea how someone without a really deep nerd understanding of Windows, and a really good toolkit, would remove some of these things–all the standard removal tools failed and I had to do some deep magic by hand. <\/p>\n
While I am now certain my machine is back to its pristine state, I am going to have nightmares about this. Not least about what’s going to happen when something like this hits my Mom and I have to try to resolve it over the phone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So, if you are the sort of person who has a fair bit of interaction with the shady computer underworld–you know where to find a download of anything, or a way to find a crack or a serial number for anything, etc, it is almost unavoidable that at some point you’re going to step into the crap and run into… Read more →<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[50,48,49,47],"class_list":["post-1029","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology","tag-deep-geekery","tag-rootkit","tag-stupid-windows","tag-virus","xfolkentry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5UQvw-gB","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1029","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1029"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1029\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1029"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1029"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.chrismclaren.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1029"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}