House of Eratosthenes

From 5:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., I spent chasing around some malware package on the laptop called “TDSS.” Up until 7 or 8 in the morning it was general spyware, from that point up until noon it was something called VUNDO. Once I got rid of VUNDO I had real feelings of accomplishment, but things still weren’t quite right.

By this time the kid was thoroughly engrossed in VIDEEYOGAYMZ!!!, and the girlfriend was eyeball deep in some man-bashing chick flick. (She retains an unusually realistic and mature outlook on life when she does this — read that as, if I ask nice, she still brings me beer. So she’s allowed.)

Meanwhile, there’s a refrigerator full of meat and buns and macaroni salad, and downstairs in the garage there’s a fresh box of beer that was supposed to have been chilling in the balcony-fridge overnight. Or at least this morning. And wasn’t. This was not how I intended to be spending my Labor Day.

Nine hours into it, I declared a moratorium on technology, and pronounced that the household should do what it intended to do today. Then I had to get everyone synchronized again. It makes me think of that time-honored saying — a liberal is a conservative who got harassed by a cop, a conservative is a liberal who got mugged. Seems to me the unpleasant thing no one wants to admit is, we begin to thirst for justice, not so much when we’re injured, as when we’re inconvenienced. When they hunt down that tenth-grader who cooked up VUNDO, they need to hang that little bastard by his balls. Nine hours of a Labor Day for which we’d spent three or four days making shopping lists and getting everything just-so. My girlfriend’s one day off work for the week. A cold barbeque grill, and everyone in separate rooms watching (or wrestling with) gizmos. Nine stinkin’ hours. Steam coming out of my ears. Urge…to…kill.

I do not know the cause-and-effect relationship of all these little beasties. I really couldn’t care less at this point. It seems, from a full day of searching, that they’re all of a fairly fresh vintage. I haven’t been on the ‘net at all today, save to check up on Rick’s blog a little bit, and to do the searching for Malware removal tools on the desktop that was no longer possible on the laptop. So Palin’s daughter is pregnant. Liberals are being classy.

And pool water stings when it goes up your nose, and makes that weird smell I remember from childhood. Cheeseburgers are good when they’re cooked on the grill.

Oh, and Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware (MBAM) fixes stuff that other things don’t. But there was a lot of other things learned from trial-and-error stuff today. I’ll put it all together in something, sometime soon. Looks like this is a recent epidemic. Maybe the information will help someone.

In hindsight, it was a very productive day. But as I said, that’s not now I intended to spend it. Consider me pissed.

Did you pop for MBAM’s full version, or just the free bits? I’m knocking on wood as I type this, but I’ve been relatively lucky in this space, so far. It’s kinda like being a biker, tho… there are only two types: those that have gone down and those that are gonna go down. (I’m in the former category, btw.)
- Buck | 09/02/2008 @ 11:08
Free for now.

My answer would probably be different if MBAM was the only tool used; is it is, it was but one in a vast arsenal that accumulated throughout the day. I’m going to guess if you divided the tools actually used productively, by the tools downloaded in desperation, the quotient would be somewhere between 60 and 75 percent — unusually high for this kind of crisis.

It was a big, gnawing, paralyzing clusterfuck m’friend, concluding a “long peace” of something like three or four years without any major spyware/virus event at ALL. And I can’t stress enough — the research revealed August/08 to be a busy month for this thing. If you check VUNDO you’ll see most of the spyware packages out there will clean everything else and leave this one standing. I’d go ahead and put together a big digest of how the day slipped away, and what I was doing, and what exactly happened to the machine. But more research is needed. I’d be pulling some stuff out of my rear end if I did it now. All I know, now, is that the laptop is clean enough to eat off of…and, repeating, I really don’t care about too much beyond that.

Oh, that, and the rumors I’ve heard about Opera, that nowadays it’ll make you happy to toss out the Fox, are entirely true. It is *very* slick.
- mkfreeberg | 09/02/2008 @ 11:31

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Labor Day 2008Monday, September 1st, 2008

Labor Day 2008
Monday, September 1st, 2008