2 hours later…

So McAfee just finished scanning: over 100,000 files, almost 2 hours and 2 restarts later. About these restarts later, but first its catch, because that’s what you’re all curious about: I mean, me, the guy who laughs about the panic virusses and trojans spread, because I can remove them all by hand because I know where to look for them. Well.

McAfee found 20 virusses. All of them duds. The first 17 were so-called Byte Verifier Java trojans. They affect the Microsoft VM and since I don’t use that VM and I’ve used Firefox (almost) from the start of using this computer, I can only imagine that they must have creeped in via whatever program that forced me to use IE. Or maybe they creeped into my system while I was downloading Firefox the very moment I turned on the computer for the first time.

There were two files tightly embedded in RFC 822 type e-mail messages. Since these need to be extracted first by a mailer that does support MIME decoding (and message parsing), these didn’t even hurt. I was aware of possible virusses matches too because, these were messages forwarded to me by Alfons so I could use them as examples for a live presentation.

The last one? It was presumably in a dll that comes with an nsis (the famous Open Source Installer) install. That DLL? Innocent, as McAfee acknowledged.. Hey, but thanks for removing it anyways! I like reinstalling stuff like that ad nauseum.

While I actually like the (bare-to-bones) install of McAfee [it’s just a plain virus scanner and it doesn’t feel like Symantec bloat], downloading updates requires a two-time computer restart: after finishing the download and after actually installing the new update. Not good, but not bad at all either: Instead of a 3 month Symantec-type-grace-period-and- then -pay-for-an-extra uh virus update, McAfee comes with a year out of the box.

This entry was posted in Truro NS. Bookmark the permalink.