I
was working on a really nasty trojan infestation at the time of my
last post. What I thought was going to be a quick fix, turned out to
be a giant hairy mess, with cooties. On an HP laptop, dual core,
Windows 7 Premium, that my neighbor had bought for 200.00. Her niece
had borrowed it and done some OOvOO and Skype and the usual kid
stuff, WITHOUT benefit of the new Microsoft Security Essentials
package (which right off the bat, has me asking a million damn
questions, such as, doesn't MS already HAVE its own Defender
and Firewall for Windows? If so, then why do they need this add-on? They do, don't they, but they don't work
worth a SHIT, so MS came up with an app that is like malwarebytes or
AVG, or Norton, or MacAfee). A note here, I know I'm in for a laff
riot, when a user hands me a laptop with all of that installed and
running, or trying to run. Pick two and stick with them, preferably
malwarebytes (the free version is just fine) and AVG – BUY the
licensed version. MacAfee and Norton are terrible and Norton is so
horrible, I used to call it back in the day when it was “Disc
Doctor”, “Kevorkian Disk Doctor” it's that horrid. It was known
to cause instant suicide if even placed in the proximity of hard drives. MacAfee
uses a weak algorithm; stay away from it.
Now
that I'm through ripping on all the hideousnesss for a minute, let me
tell you what you need to know if you come up with this little gem:
f5f5dc.com. Find the nearest cliff and jump off. Just kidding. If you
run a pingback on that bastard, it's going to take you to a
404 error screen, along with your quickly evaporating store of patience, so GOOGLE this bastard: "f5f5dc.com" for
this:
Bad
juju. Anything east of the Iron Curtain is pretty much bad juju.
Don't get me wrong. I do a lot of work with the Russians on SAT@home
and they are my second largest readership, but for some reason, the
majority of trojans and malware come from east of the ole' Iron
Curtain. Anyway, this nasty little booger snuck in with our old
friend JAVA, on my friend's laptop and is called an “exploit”
because JAVA is designed to be “exploitable”. You can read that
article here. JAVA is evil and should be killed, buried and drawn-and-quartered ASAP.
This guy helpfully supplied an ENTIRE copy of his what his O/S was trying to do and I isolated the 27 instances of the call commands to HOST or devices/servers outside of his laptop. I had more than 50 such instances on the laptop I was working on and by that time, very little space for any operations by the PC itself. Maddening.
All
that aside, trying to run Restore after running malwarebytes on my
friend's laptop didn't fix the problem, because the site, or non-site
f5f5dc.com is set up to download a little number called tesch.b9 (a
true reiterative trojan-high level threat), which causes that laptop
to “call” or to try and open numerous browsers via ports, only it
truncates that operation and never goes any farther than launching
the svchost.dll32 file. Not once, not twice, but as many iterations
as the computer will allow until the system is so bogged down, you
cannot do anything. At. All. Needless to say, this threw me; I'd
never seen it, and when I looked in Task Manager under “Processes”
I saw 50 of these svchost.dll32 files and had not yet opened a
browser although I was connected to the internet.
I
rebooted into Safe Mode without the Internet and saw the various
programs, which I removed via Control Program; Adobe Reader, Java,
SpyWareBlaster(?), OovOO, but left Skype. I restarted and tried to
start a normal session and got the same nonsense. Shit. I was left
with nothing but the System Repair, as if the computer had
just left the factory to fix it. I found this information from a
website called “Tech Support Guy”, found here.
For
John Holton, and a few others out there who asked, if you run the
malware bytes and the system is behaving properly, but calling for
new browser sessions, the best instructions in the world are to be
found here and make tons of sense. For everyone else, if
you're on a PC, and even if you have itunes, or whatever, you need to
seriously reconsider whether you want to keep running JAVA. I haven't
run JAVA since 2011, and I have 4 systems, and have not had to reload
anything. But, it really sucks if you lose all of your data files,
especially your pictures and your videos. Do yourself a huge favor
and check out Dropbox and Synch; they're free for the first 5 gigs
and you can safely store your LOLcats, recipes for onion dip and pictures of little Johnny
dropping Gampy's dentures in the toilet.
I'm
still batting .1000 for fixes, but the trojans get nastier and meaner
and I can only do so much after the fact. Someone needs to bring me a
nice relational database problem, or something; this living on the
edge has got to stop!
Speaking
of living on the edge, Alex and I rode the bus recently; actually we
ride it all the time, but every so often, you get lucky and
something, or somebody note-worthy happens along. It was a Friday
morning and already in the 90s and muggy. We were sitting in the bus
shelter, on Nebraska Ave., 33605, waiting to ride uptown to some of the stores, when this
gentleman appeared, and I use that term the way in which it was
intended. This was a gentle soul. He had on sandals, nondescript
pants and shirt and a cane. His long, flowing hair was blond and his
eyes were blue. He had a long, long, well-kept beard; it was a
patriarchal beard. His gaze appeared fixed on some other world. Alex
was sitting across from me, and this gentlemen stood between us and a
bit to the rear of the bus shelter, so that I could see Alex's eyes.
He caught mine, and quickly looked at our gentle soul and said
“Hallelujah!” just about the time I noticed that our gentleman
was carrying, besides his cane, some kind of wooden stake with a
point on the end.
Buddy Jesus wasn't riding the bus that day. I can just hear my Ma; "You are SO going to Hell, Mary Louise!" and I can hear my Daddy laughing; I was the one who told the Episcopal Priest, who had been invited to Sunday Dinner in a fit of ecumenicism by my mother, "Hmmm, Catholic Lite, All the Ritual, Only Half the Guilt." That's not even my line, but I'd heard it somewhere; my mother spent that lunch with a hideous fixed grin on her face, but it didn't stop her from inviting starving protestant Pastors, Rabbis and various leaders of other faiths over for Sunday dinner. We probably had a snake-charmer or a Warlock, in the crowd somewhere.
I
turned my head away from our gentle soul and hissed “I am so going
to beat the shit out of you, Alex!” and spent the next seven
minutes until the bus arrived trying not to look at anyone or
anything. When the bus finally DID arrive, forty-three eternities
later, Alex and I kindly let the gentle soul get on first. I burst
out, “What is wrong with you? You were making fun of “Jesus, the
Vampire Killer! I can't take you anywhere!” The last part of this
was drowned out by the 'hood, which decided to drive by and share its
music with us, at that precise moment. Yo! BOOM BOOM! Cracklezzz! Yo!
BOOM BOOM! Cracklezzz! Yo! BOOM BOOM! Cracklezzz! Yo! BOOM BOOM!
Cracklezzz! (The cracklezzz being the part of the sub-woofers that
ripped itself in two and died a few years ago, I guess, back when our
'banger was livin' large.) All of this happenin' sound is crammed
into a crappy little Toyota Corolla, the car of choice for 'bangers
on the go, complete with doors and hood in different colors than the
body. The rear sags on one end and the car is belching some ferocious
smoke. The driver is either so short, all you can see is the top of
his head, or the springs all broke in his driver's seat, OR, he's got
the bitch leaned back in a nearly-prone position; he is the
personification of phat. The traveling rap show leaves us, just as we
get on the bus. Well, my day has just been made.
Everything
else around here has been the ole' same-o same-o, minus the knife
fights. We still have to pick Señor Cerveza up out of the street now
and then, but he's a fixture; at least we know where he is. There's a
new restaurant opening up, just to the west of us. At least I assume
it's a restaurant; they're moving in tables for four and chairs to
match. I can't tell from the décor what the cuisine will be; just so
long as they're not serving cat. Just kidding.
Mama, doing the second-best thing that cats do. The first thing is eating.
This
is enough of a “debut” for me on what is the eve of #ROW80 3RD
QTR 2014. I am committing myself to posting EVERY DAY as I once did
when I started #ROW80. I do love to write and getting back into the
harness, I know, will make me a better writer and I hope, better
equipped to dealing with editing “Music of the Spheres”. I've
been trying this whole editing thing, and as one who has always
slapped words down onto a page and STET, I don't have this whole
patience thing down, nor do I have much of a filter; too much
second-guessing.
I
took a bit of time off from any social media, which I hope has not
hurt me too much. It can be overwhelming, and dealing with home stuff
has taken priority; JC's heart attack was a huge wake-up call for him
and everything was thrown off-kilter. His health has been much better
of late, but I am also a “lone-wolf” in the sense that I get
burnt out on people; even online. Blame my Asperger and bipolar, but
I always feel I get lost in the shuffle and that is more habitual
thinking on my part, and I've been practicing self-affirmation, and
asserting oneself. I did a lot of that when I was in the homeless
shelter, but that's a whole other skill set, one in which you NEVER
back down, even if, as von Clausewitz stated, “war is (or becomes)
the continuation of politics”. Obviously, this is much different
and besides, I have always been comfortable being alone. But, too
much of it is not healthy; I don't want to end up like the weirdo
cat-lady.
At
any rate, I feel renewed and ready to join in the fun, conversation
and camaraderie with other writers, and especially my pals at #ROW80.
There's also #NaNoWriMo looming, and I have to figure out what in the
hell I'm going to write for this; I hope I'm not a one-trick pony.
1 comment:
Thiss is great
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