techrecovery | (no subject)

(no subject)

We don't service personal computers. If it's the department chair or an important professor, we may work on a personal laptop. But we don't touch student's personal machines. Ever. So why have I spent the last 2 days clearing spyware infections off of an undergrad's personal machine?

$BOSS: "His mom called, and I felt bad."

Grrrrrrrrr.

He had limewire installed and running under an admin account. Along with Norton. *gazes into the heavens* NORTON!!

It's getting a fresh format and install after I backed up what documents I could find. I fought the spyware, and the spyware won.

I'm really tempted to contact his mother and show her just what I found when cleaning out her little boy's computer. Still think he needs his computer for school mommy?

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ftl

Since your boss seems to take direction from people's mothers, have your mom call next time you need a day off and he won't give it to you :)

"Hello, Mom of $student? Hi, this is $name calling from the University's IT department. I'm just calling to tell you that we're working on $student's computer, and I had a question. Unfortunately I'm not able to get a hold of $student, so I was wondering... See, I've backed up all of the documents I could find, but I've got this 4gb of illegally downloaded music, and 5gb of pr0n, and I wanted to know if I should back that up as well, because it will take a lot longer to get the laptop back to $student for him to use it for, ahem, 'school work'."

The malware is getting ROUGH these days. There's a strain going around right now that digs itself in deeper with, literally, every freaking hour it's on there - a machine that I get to the same day, I can generally fix; but one that's been infected for a week will have installed so many bogus services, hidden processes, winlogon notify keys, BHO's, search hooks... that, yeah, fuck, I just can't get it all.

Protip that really won't help you in these situations, but might be helpful if you ARE responsible for a certain set of computers that some goddamn monkey might malware up: ERUNT is a free registry backer-upper that produces byte-perfect copies of the registry, hot. So you have the option of booting from a Linux liveCD and literally just cp'ing the backed up copies from a week/month/whatever ago on top of the live registry, then booting back into Windows and *poof* Bob's your uncle.

I'm starting to make that shit a default part of new machine installs now, along with scheduled tasks to make weekly backups and rotate 'em.

My GF's brother destroyed a perfectly good HP laptop in less than two months like that...

$BRO - "Why won't it start up right anymore?"
$ME - "Well, quite literally... because you touch yourself at night."

Of course, being family, i couldn't actually SAY it... but my God, the TEMPTATION...

Boot Ubuntu install DVD.
Install.
Call student: "your machine is fixed".

For variety, mix it up; FreeBSD, or even OpenBSD. Once word gets out you're doing free UNIX/Linux installs, switch to DR-OpenDOS.

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