Made an alarming discovery on my XP machine today – it was infected!
I noticed it was taking longer and longer to boot up, and being fairly unresponsive at times even though nothing was happening. Then the dreaded happened – the ‘unrelated’ pop-up window when accidently launching Internet Explorer. This set alarm bells ringing and a quick scan of my task list highlighted two suspects – bargains.exe and msbb.exe.
I downloaded Ad-Aware to try and remove them, but I checked the registry beforehand to see where they were being launched from, and after Ad-Aware claimed to have ‘quarantined” them, the entries were still there.
I decided not to risk it, and proceeded with a re-build (all of my data lives on other drives or another machine), followed by SP2 and then for the first time ever Anti-Virus! I’ve never been a big fan of Anti-Virus, believing instead that being sensible was better protection. I still do, and I believe my machine got infected through my own stupidity (I can trace the infection down to one of three actions), but still I decided to bite the bullet and take advantage of Computer Associates offer in conjunction with Microsoft of 12 months free Anti-Virus and Firewall.
The Anti-Virus does what it’s supposed to, and the firewall appears to be branded version of ZoneAlarm which is very good if you want to know everything your computer is sending/receiving.
I’m tempted to ditch my XP partition though, and invest in a copy of VMWare for those times that I really need it. Of course, if I can get my scanner working with Linux I shouldn’t need XP anymore…