October 17, 2008

Horse 925 - Malware, Malappropriate, Malicious



I am typing this post from a Wintel machine currently operating without a GUI. The strange but true thing about this is that if you really wanted to you could in theory run Windows from a bare command line and it would still work.

It all started when Snowy and I stumbled on an ancient door... no seriously, what happened was that AVG, found some sort of malicious threat somewhere and attempted to remove it. What AVG wasn't smart enough to work out though, was that the malware in question had deleted windows.exe and replaced with with either its own version or has corrupted what's there.

You really have to admire the genius of whoever created this though. Here's Windows sitting merrily all by itself and without any prompting, Mr Malware comes along and disguises itself as the GUI and because it did it so effortlessly, AVG hasn't realised that it was Mr Malware, until Sir Windows-Crash-A-Lot told it. Up comes the little red shield in the corner and quicker than you can say Jack Robinson and His Amazing Shark-Infested Custard, bang - Mr Malware has done his dash, and set up a deckchair to watch the machine crash into the digital iceberg of destiny.

It leaves me with the problem now of doing a file recover off of this machine and hopfully saving all of the little hidey instructions that tell it how to talk with ASIC, the ATO, the Law Courts, the Dept of Defence as well as all our other lovely VPN clients.

Malware, Malware, bo-balware
Banana-fana fo-falware
Fee-fi-mo-malware
Malware!

No comments: