Well here I am, back from vacation! I wish I could say I am as ecstatic as the exclamation point indicates but, I am not. Winter vacation was far from uneventful as has been the past couple of years. Alyssa I and went to Bangor and stayed at the Hollywood Slots hotel. We decided to hit up the casino where Alyssa, with her last 12 dollars, managed win double our money back. We went to the Texas Roadhouse..which I love and we also found an awesome deal on Microsoft Office 2007 at the Circuit City liquidation. Bought two copies for 45 dollars each which have already sold on Ebay for twice that. Don't judge me for taking advantage of a liquidation either, poorly run companies SHOULD suffer. What else..oh, we bought a new 46 inch Sony Bravia LCD TV for our living room, it's pretty sweet. My Xbox died again, had to send it in for repairs. Oh..yeah..and I got engaged! :) Over vacation Alyssa and I scoured every jewlery store within 200 miles and I ended up buying her ring on 02/17/09, proposed on 02/18/09 at Napoli's in Caribou. Since she picked the ring out, she obviously loved it..and me for not being an idiot and picking out something she would hate. We plan on getting married soonish, we plan on taking a cruise, at least that was the last plan:)
Okay, now down to business. I returned to work on Tuesday thanks to the fun little snowstorm we had on Sunday/Monday, only to be inundated with strange little issues. Somehow our Administrative secretary managed to update the Maine State Retirement figures in her accounting system not once..but four times. Each update applying itself to the previous update and therefore giving everyone a nice huge retirement sum. I was called upon to restore the previous tables from backup. No problem right? Wrong. Our accounting system is DOS based..so..yeah..I had to actually compare file modification dates and update individual DOS files. Took a good 2 hours. Once I was done with that, I received a computer in my office that was doing some funny stuff. First it was mentioned that a spyware scan kept starting itself and it kept nagging them to download and install this software that it recommended. So, my first thought was "great, another antivirus 2009". Wrong. It was something called System Security. I originally had pointed the user to a place on the web where it listed step-by-step instructions to remove most malware, including antivirus 2009. The user told me that she couldn't install Malwarebytes antimalware as instructed. She said that it would close the second she tried to install it. I found this a bit strange so I decided to take a look myself. Not only would it close anything you tried to install, whether it be malwarebytes, avira antivir..or any other antivirus...it wouldn't let you uninstall anything. Also, if you tried searching for anything related to malware removal..it would close your browser. Nasty little bugger. I'm still fighting with it. I've tried everything I can think of, including a rescue cd provided by Avira that works by booting into a linux OS included on the disc and running the scan from there. It found some stuff but didn't really help much. I'm afriad this may call for a reformat. Sad part is, it was all caused by uneducated computer users playing around on the internet without a care in the world. I could tell the second that I looked at the computer that they download anything that flies in front of their faces. One of the malware programs I found is attached to an opened mail message...so that tells me that they open email attachments from people they don't know. Adaware and spybot were both last updated in may of 2008. That was when I worked on the computer last. Antivirus..well..I couldn't check it because it wouldn't run at all. At first I felt bad telling the user that the computer would probably have to be reformatted and they would lose all of their stuff...but...after seeing how they've been using it...I'm hoping it'll turn into a learning experience for them. I took the time to explain safe internet practices and recommend good preventative maintenance software. Lets see if they put the advice to good use.
UPDATE: So I've discovered that I'm dealing with a rootkit..mass password change and reformat here we come!
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