Too many worms
I didn't get a chance to blog on Friday due to the words all IT professionals hate to hear from their friends:
"My computer is running slowly, could you come over and take a look at it please?"
My friend June is a nurse who uses her computer for emails, IM and medical research. Her 2 kids use it for all sorts of things, animation, movies, music, puppies and kids stuff. Well lately their PC had been running slower and slower and now annoying websites had started to pop up. So I agreed to have a look at it.
The first thing I notices was that Windows Defender had been disabled on their machine and IE Privacy tab had been set to accept all cookies (there were hundreds and hundreds of cookies on the machine). Every time I reset the settings and enabled Defender, the reboot would change everything back.
I tried all of the spyware killers and spyware destroyers I cold find, deleted lots of roadkill .DLL's and spent far too long deleting keys from the registry - just to make sure. There were over 100 worms, bots, spies and other nasties in the machine - no wonder the damn thing wasn't working too well. The malicious software removal tool certainly did it's job well enough. But I'm still not sure...
And with everyone in the family having Administrator access, I knew I was on a hiding to nothing. Who knows what the hell other stuff could possibly be on there?
So now I need to spend several more hours round there sorting the PC out (totally formatting it) out so it can be trusted again. No more administrator access for them - and no more downloading of stuff just because it looks nice. But the main thing I need to do is to educate them all on the dangers of downloading bits of software whenever they're asked to.
Just how I feel... :-)