Posted on 10/06/2010 12:08:46 PM PDT by Nachum
Virus-infected computers that pose a risk to other PCs should be blocked from the net, a senior researcher at software giant Microsoft suggests. The proposal is based on lessons from public health, said Scott Charney of the firm's Trustworthy Computing team. It is designed to tackle botnets - networks of infected computers under the control of cybercriminals. Putting machines in temporary quarantine would stop the spread of a virus and allow it to be cleaned.
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
When you get an OS and all apps loaded, create an image of your hard drive. Then you can get back from bare iron to that initial clean, vanilla point in an hour or so. You’ll have to take complementary measures in order not to lose data files, emails, and so on.
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Download (for free) Microsoft Steadystate. However, it will no longer be available after the end of this year.
Download (for free) Microsoft Steadystate. However, it will no longer be available after the end of this year.>>>>>>>
Thanks much. Never heard of it before. Too bad it doesn’t work for windows 7. The library has WinXP and it must be what they use
I will try it w Windows XP. Thanks!
What I was referring to was not the OS reload, but the reinstallation of Quark and Xtags and Xdata plugins, Creative Suite, Gimp, Ghostscript, MSoffice with netframe addition, some Excel plugins, a Java 5250 terminal immulator, Grep, Gnumeric, PDFtk, Bluefish (and more) and updating the OS. All of that is a genuine pain to get working again.
When I used that PC, I used every tool in the tool box to get the workflow done. A mixture of open source and closed source apps. The workflow process was a total hack.
I created a 3,000 page print catalog, the distributor seasonal promotion books (some were close to 1,000 pages), monthly specials, maintained the descriptions in the AS400 database and created the images for both print an the web for 37,000 items. (I took them to the web for the first time by extracting the image to item (sku) data after opening the print .pdf document and using Grep to extract the intelligence. And did the same thing for the item level sequencing for repeat of the catalog sections.)
Right, neither was I. In fact I would have been stupid to do so. Imaging the machine after just the OS install would be pointless as a restore wouldn't be any quicker than just starting from scratch and reinstalling the OS. I said to back it up after you got your apps installed, which addressed your original complaint.
OK, I understand. Ghost the drive. Good approach and I probably should have thought about doing that, but the apps I used were a bit fluid and there was not a beginning start point that had them all in place.
As it worked out, I was able to remove the Trojan and had no further problems with the install. I used that same machine for 5-1/2 years.
It was a Gateway to begin with, but I reloaded the OS in the beginning to allow it to be used in our network. It was picked up off-the-shelf with Windows Media, which did not allow the network config we needed. I put XP Pro on it and added the netframe upgrades.
It was very reliable machine.
Yeah, exactly. Either ghost the drive to another physical drive (now that’s a REALLY fast recovery — five minutes!) or you can create a single large image file and store it on a server if you don’t have the extra hard drive sitting around when you make the image.
The only real deficiencies I have with Linux vs Windows is with CAD apps and Publishing apps. That is coming along, but not really an acceptable substitute yet.
I messed with Scribus for a while, it is pretty good. But to script the input data I would have to write an import script in Python. I was not capable of doing that. Could probably have learned how, but did not have the time to do it. And at 62 programming is not that efficient.
As far as an acceptable substitute for AutoCad there is not one I found that would run on Linux. It may be at some point MicroStation or someone else will produce a port, but I have not seen it.
I’ve run AutoCAD from within a virtual machine and it runs fine. You could run VMWare and run AutoCAD in a Windows VM. I’d hate to give up AutoCAD for anything else, as I have 20 years of Lisp files that do half the work for me.
Why is it that my computers at work are always getting viruses? Over and over again. But, after 20 years of computing on Macs, I have never gotten a virus.
Nor have any of my Apple using friends.
We had a pretty small IT department. It consisted of a manager and 1 assistant. There were some computer operators, but they did not make adjustments, simply ran the system as is. There were about 4 other users who the IT department trusted with almost total access to the system.
The company ran on an AS400 IBM and a custom written software package for the warehouse, billing and accounting. My department used some queries to recover the data from the AS400. I got pretty proficient at modifying the queries to fine tune the process.
They bought a new AS400 about 3 years ago and a canned warehouse management software package. I think it would have worked, but the CA division failed about 2 years ago (bad management and CA) and that with some purchases that the owner made brought down the company I was with. It was a 106 year old company, and year before last it made $1,000,000 bottom line for the owner. They are liquidating the company now.
For the last 1-1/2 years I worked remotely and really liked that. I could do anything remotely that I could do in the office over the VPN network. It was pretty slick.
Never tried to use VMware with it. My version is not very current, but it just might work. I lived with a CAD program and a spreadsheet for about 7 years. I planned retail stores for a distributor near Kansas City. Traveled 11 states for them at one time. We were very buys then.
I no longer have Quark. I tried to purchase my PC from the company I worked for, when they let me go and closed the catalog department (just before the salesmen and 2 of the top execs jumped to the company I worked for in Kansas City.) I think one of the buyers in the office must have offered more money for the PC.
The machine was old but it had some data on it that might have had a value to another company. I did make copies of the 5,000 color master images that I created after we put the web catalog in place. I did not make copies of the grayscale images. Also made copies of the manufacturers logos that I used in the promotions. (color and grayscale) Some day I might find a use for them again.
I began in the wholesale hardware distribution industy in Jan. 1972. It has been a while. Most of my time was in outside sales, advertising, sales management, store planning and finally the catalog department. There were 725 companies like that in the US when I started, but today there are less than 40. The number of viable companies is even less than that.
It's free now for the stuff you'd want to use, so go get the upgrade. That's another way of making installed stuff easily portable between machines too. Keep all your apps in VM's on a separate hard drive. If your hard drive dies, load the VM software on any convenient machine, move over the hard drive containing the VM's, and shazam, you're back in business!
Adobe? LOL! Next to Microsoft, they are the biggest substrate for malware!
I use Preview on the Mac and Foxit when on Windoze.
Dammit, driftdiver, you got my goat with that piece of silliness. Any reasonable person already knew that all complex software is vulnerable long before the recent adobe issues. OTOH, your statement is freakin' meaningless in this context, if you evaluate the numbers.
Infected computers on the internet are a Windows problem. Trying to smear other OSes will not make that problem go away. I assume you're trying to smear Macs, since the number of Linux and Unix machines is nearly negligible by comparison.
Now please, read this bearing in mind that I am a very satisfied user of Win7 for the past year or more, at home and at work. I'm not trashing Windows, per se, just pointing out that this is a Windows problem.
Note that the total Windows PCs outnumber the total Macs by roughly 10:1.
Note that the zombie Windows PCs outnumber the zombie Macs by (oh I don't know, let's guess) 50,000,000:1
About, oh, maybe 5,000,000:1.
all OS’s are vulnerable
BTW, if you have figures for the above that you like better than my estimates, please supply them.
Fact is, there aren't any Mac botnets in the wild. The one seemingly credible report some months back was quickly found to have been cooked up by a rogue anti-virus employee, who when pressed admitted he didn't have any actual evidence. Every such "finding" of virus-laden Macs has turned out to be bogus propaganda from the AV vendors.
Of course, there are trojans and such that affect Mac users using social engineering; everyone knows that the weak link in a Mac system, like any other system, is the user.
But if you think you know of a true Mac virus -- self-replicating, capable of spreading itself around the internet without the user being aware -- name it and provide links to where it is described by a reputable source.
Essentially the same thing is true of Linux and BSD Unix.
Zombie Macs in botnets spewing crap over the internet? In your dreams, maybe.
Face it, the problem is a Windows problem. As such, Microsoft is in a good position to make the recommendation that infected PCs should be pulled off the internet.
As a satisfied Win7 user, I would like to see all prior versions of Windows (including Vista) upgraded to Win7, and have at least MS Security Essentials installed. That alone would address 99% of the Windows botnet problems.
Nope, a simple, inexpensive product:
Highly recommended (I'm not in any way associated with the company, except as a satisfied customer).
Get your computer into the state you like it, "freeze" it, and every time you boot, it comes back to the prior state.
Of course, you have to "thaw" it to do things like Windows Updates, install new programs, etc. Then you "freeze" it again.
I have used this program for years on open-access computers. It's the only way to go, IMO.
Oh, by “inexpensive” I mean $45. I consider that a very fair price for the high quality and robustness of the product.
Please provide a list of the self-replicating, self-transmitting, self-installing computer viruses or worms that are in the wild for the Apple OSX operating system... by that I am referring to actual exploited, dangerous computer virus or worms, not proof-of-concept demonstration code seen only in a computer lab one-day-wonders, or the physical "a hacker must be present for it to work contest break-in exploits", nor a list of theoretical vulnerabilities... but an actual, working, computer virus that is a threat to other OSX computers exposed to the wild.
Social engineering Trojans, that require the participation of stupid or greedy users, need not apply.
Many many thanks. I will download and test drive it. That’s one way to make a machine much less vulnerable to viruses. These days your Yahoo and Gmail email is stored in “the cloud” and the rest you do on a particular session could be kept on an external drive and/or in cloud backup and storage. Such as SugarSynch which I got (the paying edition) for my nephew in college
All the above depends on what kind of computer user you are. Look at the Ipad with its small storage. It is dependent on cloud storage
Sugar Synch gives anyone 2GB free cloud storage
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