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.
Not that I am such a person, of course.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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