This Space for Rent

Ah. The viruses aren’t coming from script kiddies after all.

A few weeks ago, I enjoyed the bliss of having to scrub both of the home Windows computers because a virus had somehow gotten onto them. At the time, I thought it was because some neighborhood script kiddy had gotten into the machines via the wireless network and was leaving me little turdlets just to say hi!, so I put WEP onto the network, blew away and reinstalled the windows machine, and put the users back on as non-admin users (which is a royal pain in the ass, because if you're not root, firemonkey and windows DRM player can't install plugins and codecs without going through some pretty extreme gyrations), and went on (almost) like normal.

(I did stop connecting to work, because I'd found that if I connected to work on a non-service-pack'ed Windows box, a hour or so into the connection my windows box would reboot out from under me.)

A few weeks passed without incident, until today, when I wanted to do a little bit of work from home where I can have tea and loud music. So I connected in to work, beat my head against the horrible scripts and version control system (repeat after me, everybody: CLEARCASE SUCKS DEAD BUNNIES THROUGH A STRAW!), and was having a fine old time until the copy of Norton I've got on the PC in the library popped up a little friendly notice, telling me that it had detected a trojan dropper on my machine.

What had I been doing out of the ordinary this morning? Oh, yeah, I was telnetting in to work, where the viruses apparently run free and Windows PCs run scared.