Hmm.. It appears that I don’t seem to be having much luck with computers at the moment. Having installed the content watch application and trashed my main PC (see earlier post), I installed the Kaspersky anti-virus package onto my backup PC and promptly trashed the registry somehow. Needless to say, it will be Avast that I go with, except for one minor problem.
I decided to re-install XP on this, my old backup PC. After that I switched the broadband modem to this PC and connected it all up to download all the latest patches released. Within 2 minutes of being online I managed to get 8 viruses installed on my PC !!! Someone is not going to be happy with me, because I ended up transmitting at 128K/sec whilst it tried to find other PC’s to infect.
XP set up my new accounts without passwords and it didn’t take too long for my PC to get infected. I quickly installed BlackIce, Avast and created new passwords for all of the new accounts.
The worrying thing was that Avast did not find all of the viruses, and I still had to manually delete them from the registry.
I think I ended up with various copies of Win32:RegZon and Win32:WootBot-R1. Avast managed to get a couple of them, but it didn’t find the registry entries, so each time I booted up, it re-infected itself.
It did the old trick of creating names similar to existing programs (such as msnmsgrr, iexplorr, servce32 etc). The big clue apart from the process list, was the amount of uplink traffic that I was seeing. I wonder if there are any tools for stopping uplink traffic so as to stop PCs from being able to infect others.
But at least my Backup PC is completely clean and is back to its lightening self.
I usually use it as a network drive for backing up my main PC since it has over 400GB of HDD space on it.
I’ve now configured it as my network gateway host, print server, to free up the main PC from doing all this work.
