BruceLee on TV!
Did anyone watch the FX channel last Saturday? It was the Street Fighter Marathon. 8 hours of Kung Fu Movies. Rock On! My favorite part was watching Bruce Lee eat a barbequed cat in an Asian graveyard while he was on the run from the law.
I've just got to share a quick little story on Data Disasters. Last Friday at work a fellow co-workette accidentally deleted some very critical client data. Bad news was that this deletion occurred across a network share drive. If you've never had the misfortune of a grade a fuck up deletion across a network share then this story is for you. I think that we are all familiar with the Windows recycle bin. Reminder when you use raid for striping it only protects your data from hardware failure not user error and accidental file deletion.
Virus Kung FU story.
A very large client of ours got infected with the Smitfraud Trojan horse. It’s a very difficult Trojan to fight. I tried to fight it remotely but it was too hard to do so we had the client pull his hard drive and ship it out to us. We mounted the drive remotely and we were able to remove it but it involved manually registry deletions, the unregistering of dll’s and then deleting the spawned processes at boot up before they could re-register to core dll files. Very tedious but during the course of the Smitfraud fight we encountered a pretty cool tool called killbox. It’s designed to pound on and delete specified binary applications or processes on reboot before they can set their teeth into your system.
The client we fixed this problem asked how he could avoid it in the future and my advice/mantra is:
- To only use software from reputable vendors that you trust.
- You get what you pay for with most software packages. (Most of the software on his system you never heard of before or you’d never see in Compusa)
- If you saw it in a pop up or in an unsolicited email (SPAM) don’t buy it, don’t click on the link to just “check it out”.
- Research the product before you think about buying it.
- If latest version of windows can do what you want then just use windows to do it. You’d be surprised how many really good apps exist in windows for free.
Footnote on file/folder deletion:
The deleted folder at work was recovered using a program called File Scavenger. This program was cheap to buy and it will recovered deleted date across network shares and it will install and run from a floppy disk if needed so you can avoid the danger of overwriting the data you just deleted.
Client Job Network Card Install.
I did another small http://www.jeffestes.com/ job the other night. A client’s daughter wanted high speed internet and the install kit with the modem and router arrived but she lacked an Ethernet port for the router. I advised to go out and pick up a network card and I dropped by the house and slapped the whole thing together in less than 20 minutes including the router setup.
Now she is cruising the internet at high speed and hidden away nicely behind her encrypted router. Now if I could just get her to upgrade away from her Windows 98 box.
That’s it I’m out.
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