Wow... And she told me that her boyfriend's brother had cleaned the machine...

[achernow.livejournal.com]

So I was out the other day to originally to fix a problem with another machine. That machine was an easy fix, the lady was having problems with certain pages on the web, not being able to connect to e-mail, and stuff like that. Turns out her late husband had cranked up IE's security to max, installed zone-alarm pro (yeah, he paid for it), and had the machine locked down. Luckily she was able to guess the password for admin access. I added firefox to the machine, informed her about IE's total lack of security and how it is better to use FF than IE, thankfully she said she'd use it. I also found on this machine, Windows Update hadn't been run in months and her Virus Scan was out of date. We windows updated her to SP2 and installed AVG on the machine. I was going to remove Zone Alarm, but opted to keep it on there even though she's behind a firewall/router.

Now, she asked me to look at her daughter's machine while I was there. Apparently her daughter's machine had tanked weeks before and she had just gotten it back from her boyfirend's brother who had re-installed XP and supposidly added more HD space to it. Ok.. First off, he installed XP and never patched it. NAV was installed but it was a cracked copy and wouldn't live update. Removed that and installed AVG. Ran a full system scan, lots of Viruses on the machine. Cleaned those. So, because I figured that there was going to me mounds of spyware as well, dowloaded and installed AdAware and Spybot S&D... Here's the results:






AHHH! Spyware central. I'm happy to report, though, that I cleaned the machine and the daughter was willing to learn how to properly maintain the machine. I should mention that her only concern was that I didn't lose her 20+ gigs of MP3s and that when I was done she could still get on iMesh. Oh and that 2nd HD the kid added, all he did was copy the main HD to the 2nd HD. I cleaned it up and now she has a nice 30 gig data drive.

Oh real quick.. Does anyone know how trick Windows Update into updating a cracked version of XP? I have a friend who swears his copy is legal (he produced media and a COA, but Idk if it's legit). Every time we try to update him to SP2 it says that his license key is invalid.

-A

Comments

[inahandbasket]

You can't trick it, you can only change the license key to a 'valid' one. (aka. one that they didn't know was on the net until after SP2 was released. ;o) )

[achernow.livejournal.com]

Thanks

-A

[codedigital.livejournal.com]

So you basically left three firewalls running on that machine?

Windows Firewall...Her hardware firewall...and Zone Alarm?

I cleaned a PC just yesterday with 17,000 objects. Not the top for me here but not bad.

[achernow.livejournal.com]

I don't think the Win Firewall was actually enabled... At least it didn't look like it in the security console.

-A

[swwinchester.livejournal.com]

Ahh, I've seen the key issue once before at work.

A quick phonecall and a fax of a photocopy of thier Media / Key, and they did the following - They sent him out a REPLACEMENT key / folder, and gave us the new key over the phone. Whole ordeal took about 30 minutes, start-to-finish.

firewall

[irishmasms.livejournal.com]

Good move - have the hardware firewall & the software firewall running on the local PC. Highly suggestied action, IMHO - and reccomended by US-CERT & SANS.


Good job!