A moment of indiscretion
All it took was the technical equivalent of a “One Night Stand”. A moment of indiscretion, and things turned sour.
Despite all the years of watching others, and the tail on the donkey role of fixing things for them after the fact, I did something stupid. Needing a USB key to transfer some data, I took one sitting on the sideboard. The files were moved, the computer was restarted (for other reasons) and all of a sudden the antivirus software realized that something was going on.
Turns out that I’m the proud owner of a rootkit, described by McAfee (after the fact, thanks for nothing at all) as NTOSKRNL-HOOK. Not welcome. My web browser has discovered a whole alternate universe, and even after some “safe reboots” and some careful erasing, and even a visit to the disk via the Linux partition, the computer wants to call somebody right away. Two instances of Internet Explorer are running, even though the desktop shows no signs of activity. The hard drive light is a beacon to the progress.
I don’t really want to reformat and start over.
My erstwhile marketing of the MSI Wind was too successful. This morning, a senior administrator dropped off the latest acquisition, with the standard request that I make it work better. You know, install the antivirus stuff and configure the email client and just check that all is well with the new baby. I’m now an AGPAR tester for shiny laptops. If only I knew where to put those special drops that prevent blindness.
