As you can tell from the title I've had a trying 24 hours ridding my computer of various viruses and such. It was an epic battle and in the end I emerged victorious, though there were many casualties.
"While heading the profit of my counsel,
avail yourself also of any helpful circumstances
over and beyond the ordinary rules."
So I had to remove my Anti-Virus program for a brief period of time. I had bought a cheap one because my McAfee CD was nowhere to be found. So I uninstalled the old one when I found my CD and installed McAfee. For some reason my McAfee AVP would crash and so I was left with the sole defenses of my firewall for a scant few days. Apparently that was all that was needed for the insidious forces of the interweb to crawl its way into my system. It had some help though, I believe.
"If he is secure at all points, be prepared for him.
If he is in superior strength, evade him.
If your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to
irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant.
If he is taking his ease, give him no rest.
If his forces are united, separate them."
So with McAfee finally working last night I was incredibly surprised to find a huge alert pop up from both my AVP and firewall almost simultaneously saying that things were going very foul indeed. Running the scan produced the horrible finds of not only Browser Hijacks, Trojans, and several other nasty things. I was forced to lock down the network to try and contain everything and then I got to work on removing things. I had to split my tricks between my Spyware cleaning, registry cleaning, and AVP. I had to do this all simultaneously because as soon as one stopped and cleared it would pop up on the next scan. I had to hit everything at once. I was growing frustrated and tired at this point. It was going on towards 2am before I set up Virus Scan and went to bed, all traffic blocked and my computer removed from the network.
"In the operations of war,
where there are in the field a thousand swift chariots,
as many heavy chariots, and a hundred thousand
mail-clad soldiers, with provisions enough to carry them
a thousand li, the expenditure at home and at the front,
including entertainment of guests, small items such as
glue and paint, and sums spent on chariots and armor,
will reach the total of a thousand ounces of silver per day.
Such is the cost of raising an army of 100,000 men."
I had to break down and buy the latest version of Virus Scan last night in my battle. I got to the point to where my older version simply wasn't picking anything up and Ad-Aware was also coming up with nada after probably the 15th scan, but still I was getting desktop pop-ups and browser hijacking. So with my troops in place I went about the ordeal of scanning, finding, editing the registry and scanning again.
"It is only one who is thoroughly acquainted
with the evils of war that can thoroughly understand
the profitable way of carrying it on."
The viruses had the advantage in that they didn't need to worry about getting tired or frustrated. I kept a cool head and continued my attack on the invaders that had held my computer hostage.
"When you engage in actual fighting, if victory
is long in coming, then men's weapons will grow dull and
their ardor will be damped. If you lay siege to a town,
you will exhaust your strength.
Again, if the campaign is protracted, the resources
of the State will not be equal to the strain."
I had laid seige to my own computer for close to 24 hours now and I had come to a certain point where neither of us was budging. I had decided that enough was enough and I fired my final salvo...I formatted my hard drive. That's not to say that the invaders didn't go down without a fight. Somehow the F1-12 keys were disabled on my keyboard and made it incredibly difficult to continue into setting up a new Windows installation. That would be when I had to get inventive. I stole a page out of David's book, a trick I saw him do a long time ago...I reprogrammed my keyboard. Through an act of High Geekery a while ago I had learned the ASCII and binary values for such an act, and I remembered David doing something of the like several years ago and so I went about the act of kludging together a small config script in the dos shell I had to install. Don't ask me why I still have DOS disks but I do.
"Thus the highest form of generalship is to
balk the enemy's plans; the next best is to prevent
the junction of the enemy's forces; the next in
order is to attack the enemy's army in the field;
and the worst policy of all is to besiege walled cities."
So needless to say I'm back and pretty well drained. Why, you may ask, did I not just reformat from the beginning. The answer is simple...I didn't want to. I was determined that I could beat this thing without resorting to the Great Wipe. However in the end it was that sort of short sighted arrogance that led to about 24 hours of me fighting this thing to a standstill. And so that was my weekend...how about you?
Mahalo
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