Alternative defenses against viral attacks
Never lower your guard, or else you’ll get hit. Sound like advice from that old feller down at the local sports club, the one that hangs around the practice ring and won’t shut up for more than the three minutes of a given round, doesn’t it. Not quite (I haven’t had to box anything more than my puppy in years). What I have in mind is the wacky world of the computer virus.
Tonight, at a time when I had reasonable expectations of a quiet evening at home (let’s ignore the shouting hockey jockeys over on the couch, they’ll run out of game and beer about the same time), we had two machines show signs of a trojan. The delightful Vundo, able to keep you deleting files for hours if you play the game wrong. I had other intentions.
My recent installation of another Linux distribution (Linux Mint) has returned my laptop to official dualboot status. I simply identified the DLL that was playing hide and seek with the McAfee gang, rebooted into that “other” OS and happily deleted the offending code. Much easier on the nerves than a round of HiJack or something of the ilk. My laptop is back to a state of relative calm, although the other machine will be in need of TLC this weekend. One day at a time, right.
At work, the fibre optic link finally showed me some speed… I had a DVD of data to “bring down” for the impending exam period, and my FTP session required something akin to five minutes for 800 Megs of ISO. I could learn to like speed.
