- Jun 21, 2000
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Trying to separate what is possible and what is paranoid here.
What is malware capable of? Can it go undetected even in Windows explorer (i.e. completely invisible to the file system yet be a threat)? Can it jump from pc to pc just by a usb stick?
My hd at work got infected by a clickjacking virus a couple of weeks ago.
Our tech guy in charge at work is a jack of all pc skills, master of none.
I have a degree in CompSci but it's been a while.
He spent an entire week scouring my hd and claimed it cautiously clean afterwards. (I know, fresh install - especially at a business!)
It worked for two weeks until one day I was looking for Tools/Folder Options... and it was gone! So I rebooted. Upon reboot, explore.exe wouldn't kick in. Wallpaper (from my domain profile) showed but no startmenu, nothing. Win-key did nothing, but ctrl-alt-del rendered Task Manager and we were able to see almost no cpu and explorer.exe using about 70k.
Reboot again, same thing but NO response, ctrl-alt-del gone.
Pulled the drive and he took it home to scour. Nothing found. Later that wknd, the pc he used to scour it freezes at WinXP's "progress bar" of boot process.
Now I want to pull a few files off of it using an external drive but he is convinced that we can't even hook the drive up without it corrupting the host pc.
Is that reasonable?
I agree we risk pulling off an infected file but without launching it aren't we safe? (I want my vbscripts for Excel stored in personal.xls). Open it on disposable win install, do screen shots or copy text, save to usb stick.
He is afraid that just the act alone of plugging the usb stick into the infected machine will pass it to the usb stick - thereby infecting any subsequent machines that the usb stick touches. - without ever being seen by the file system or malware detector???
Sounds paranoid to me. I took the drive home myself, external drive to my xandros eee pc, pulled the file, eee is fine, AVG doesn't detect virus, nor Yahoo email that uses Norton.
Can I get some thoughts on what is prudent and what is paranoid here?
I've used my usb stick since, the eee since (10d ago) with no problem.
What is malware capable of? Can it go undetected even in Windows explorer (i.e. completely invisible to the file system yet be a threat)? Can it jump from pc to pc just by a usb stick?
My hd at work got infected by a clickjacking virus a couple of weeks ago.
Our tech guy in charge at work is a jack of all pc skills, master of none.
I have a degree in CompSci but it's been a while.
He spent an entire week scouring my hd and claimed it cautiously clean afterwards. (I know, fresh install - especially at a business!)
It worked for two weeks until one day I was looking for Tools/Folder Options... and it was gone! So I rebooted. Upon reboot, explore.exe wouldn't kick in. Wallpaper (from my domain profile) showed but no startmenu, nothing. Win-key did nothing, but ctrl-alt-del rendered Task Manager and we were able to see almost no cpu and explorer.exe using about 70k.
Reboot again, same thing but NO response, ctrl-alt-del gone.
Pulled the drive and he took it home to scour. Nothing found. Later that wknd, the pc he used to scour it freezes at WinXP's "progress bar" of boot process.
Now I want to pull a few files off of it using an external drive but he is convinced that we can't even hook the drive up without it corrupting the host pc.
Is that reasonable?
I agree we risk pulling off an infected file but without launching it aren't we safe? (I want my vbscripts for Excel stored in personal.xls). Open it on disposable win install, do screen shots or copy text, save to usb stick.
He is afraid that just the act alone of plugging the usb stick into the infected machine will pass it to the usb stick - thereby infecting any subsequent machines that the usb stick touches. - without ever being seen by the file system or malware detector???
Sounds paranoid to me. I took the drive home myself, external drive to my xandros eee pc, pulled the file, eee is fine, AVG doesn't detect virus, nor Yahoo email that uses Norton.
Can I get some thoughts on what is prudent and what is paranoid here?
I've used my usb stick since, the eee since (10d ago) with no problem.