Friday, January 23, 2009

On Weapons of Mass Destruction

Tēnā koutou katoa – Greetings to you allThree Medieval Shields
There have been 7 enemy assaults since mid-November 2008. Three intrusions in the last few days were from different locations. The latest sorties brought activity within local boundaries to a near halt. Strong garrison defended the battlements and three prisoners were detained - origin unknown. Following a perfunctory hearing, they were summarily executed and their remains destroyed.

It’s not clear the extent of local injury sustained by the attack. Collateral damage is still being assessed and there’s a likelihood of some loss of life.

Fortunately, alerts aroused the attention of the home guard, prompting immediate vigilance within the resident defense systems.


The most recent attacks showed how important it is to ensure strong garrison is put in place, to
provide frequent updates, and to be vigilant so that defense systems are kept on the alert at all times.

Here’s my list of enemy attacks to date:


Virus History Table
The SbCtri.exe, alias W32.Spybot.worm, is particularly nasty. It was buried in the Registry of my computer spitting out clones of itself, which, fortunately, WinPatrol and Spybot-Search And Destroy were able to detect and eliminate.

I had downloaded updates from Symantec just the day before, for I’d already been alerted to the presence of the worm. It was only when I received the latest update from Symantec the following day, that I was able to destroy the intruder SbCtri.exe, together with a couple of resident Trojan horses.

My total defense system consists of the following:

BlackICE PC Protection (firewall)
Symantec Antivirus (virus checker)
Spybot-Search And Destroy (spyware detector and destroyer)
WinPatrol (spyware detector)

I perform frequent updates to my security system and spyware detectors. I take automatic updates from Windows. I also run Ad-AwareAE by LAVASOFT quite frequently.

A few years ago I used to do weekly updates to the virus checker.
Now I do it daily, sometimes twice a day. It’s a bit of a worry.


Ka kite anō – Catch ya later

2 comments:

Ken Stewart said...

Ken, I now run multiple layers of protection as well... but I run them on separate devices - blocking and attempting to be as stealthy as possible. However, it is now increasingly difficult to guard against trash from innocuous websites even...

Blogger In Middle-earth said...

Tēnā koe Ken!

"Trash from innocuous websites"? I have a slightly different opinion, Ken. If it's trash, it's not innocuous :-)

Catchya