Still Got Problems

[rowyn]

Lut's computer was being hacked, by some script kiddie, we guess. He found a file labeled "webdav.exe" planted on his machine, along with various other permissions being messed up, to prevent him from undoing the damage. We downloaded a patch from Microsoft that's supposed to fix the security hole that allowed it in. Lut used the command-prompt safemode to get the permissions he needed back, and thinks he's got his computer back under control.

But whatever this was, it's not apparently connected to the problems plaguing my computer. Mine doesn't have any of the signs of attack that his machine did. He doesn't think anyone's been after it; I'm not so sure. I noticed this morning I was getting a lot of harddrive activity when I wasn't doing anything. WHich went away after I unplugged the cablemodem and rebooted. But I still don't know. Maybe I'm just paranoid.

Upshot: I'm still basically unable to "talk" from home, and I'm not counting on my continued ability to use my machine to scan the net, either. I talked to Lut about possibly re-formatting my harddrive and reinstalling Windoze, but there's no guarantee that'll work, either, since we've no idea what the problem is. At least I've got all my email and writings backed up to CD, as of Sunday evening.

We'll see.

(Gosh, Linux sounds so attractive right now ....)

Comments

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Hard drive activity would definitely make me suspicious. I use 'netstat -a' in the DOS command prompt to detect if there are any programs that are accessing the net when they shouldn't be.

My suggestion would be to copy off all the data files (only, not any of the programs) and reformat the hard drive, then install Win2000 Pro fresh, then download all the latest patches before reinstalling programs and copying your data back in. Odds sound rather good that it's a worm of some kind.