A very good friend asked me to fix her sister's boyfriend's infected computer (referred to hereafter as SB.) She had warned me that he was an idiot, but I was completely unprepared for what I found.
I spent a couple hours trying to clean up the data in a VM environment. Cleared off literally hundreds of infections (all sorts of trojans, viruses, and assorted malware) with a variety of tools. Still not clean. Called my friend, explained that I could wipe and restore the system in less than an hour. She checked with the SB, he said no, he had never backed anything up. I'm thinking to myself "Ok, pretty much the stupidest move possible." I tell her I'll continue to try to clean it, but no promises of actually recovering anything. Apparently when she relayed this message, SB actually cried. SB demanded that his data be restored. Again, I made no promises.
Flash forward 10 more hours of cleaning. In the process I noticed he had multiple P2P software installed, including LimeWire, Kazaa, etc. He also has a very substantial collection of porn. I try to salvage everything I can. The problem started when his Symantec went out of subscription and he failed to renew it, update it, or even go get a different free anti-virus program.
Then I put the drive back in and try to boot it. I got the following screen:
I saw that and panicked. OMG, after all the work on this thing so far and its still hosed! I quickly snap a photo with my crackberry in case anyone has seen this sort of thing before. I forward it to my friend, who sends it on to SB.
A few hours later I get a text back from my friend "SB says he actually NAMED his computer Hacking Computer". Uh, wow. I call her back and we're both laughing so hard we nearly pee ourselves. We were both happily picturing every REAL hacker in the world busting into this computer and anally-raping SB over and over through the Internet, just to show him what real hacking is.
Please feel free to renumber this into your own order of stupidity. Here's mine:
1. Naming computer Hacking Computer
2. Not ever backing up ANY data...for 5 years. Yeah, 5. (this is based on age of the machine and dates of files)
3. Installing P2P and porn
4. Not keeping at least one up-to-date anti-virus program running.
5. Not knowing how to clean the computer after it got infected.
6. Not just saying "Ok, I guess I'm going to lose everything" and accepting the loss as a result of your own direct stupidity.
There are also the additional segments of dumb like disabling the firewall, allowing sharing of his entire hard drive through LimeWire, etc, but you can add or delete those as you feel like.
How very nice. This is the kind of db that will eventually make it necessary for non-biz innerweb customers to be hooked up with a thin client that stores everything in the cloud. What bot net did it belong to?
ReplyDeleteIt got even better. I asked my friend to have SB call me. He called me while standing immediately in front of the Hard Rock Cafe in SF on his cell phone. So not only could I understand only about 1 word in 10, I had to yell to make myself heard as well. I explained that I had found multiple infections in the MBR that can't be cleaned, and that with a 5+yr old 40GB IDE HD it wasn't worth trying to even reformat to reinstall Windows. I explained he could get an adequate drive for $20 now (he didn't believe me, thinks it will cost him at least $100..heh) and I'd just put Win back on it. I told him if I did this he needed to make sure he regularly backed up everything. His response?
ReplyDelete"Well, I guess it is partly my fault. I probably shouldn't have let my anti-virus program go without updating for a year"...
PARTLY YOUR FAULT? It is ALL your fault. No one else is at fault here, especially me. So keep your wanna-be nerd punk dumb-ass away from me, because next time I see you in person I'm going to shove your stupid testicles down your own throat so you can never breed this sort of stupidity.