Friday, August 10, 2007

Viruses, spam, spyware... oh my

For all your little "script puppies" out there.... kiss my ass you little bastards! Grow up, get a life and, if possible, a girlfriend.

If the only joy in life that you can get is to hack into a system and dump stupid viruses or change the security settings then you need a sledge hammer to your gonads to make sure you don't breed. I have the sledge hammer and I am more than willing to use it, for the betterment of our world and the universe at large.

I can't understand the people in this world who just don't care. I know everyone has their selfish moments, I have quite a few actually, but in the end, I understand (or try to) the impact my actions have on other people. I may enjoy and get a little shiver of pleasure out of cutting someone off on the highway when they won't be nice and let me into their lane (I do use my blinker). But I always give a little wave while they flip me the bird.

The people who are creating the viruses, the spam messages and the spyware/Malware programs are the dregs of society. Ok, fine, maybe they have a couple brain cells but their impact on society and the world is not for the positive.

Well, fine, maybe some of those spam messages are giving people a chance to buy Viagra and porn but that just means that the idiots who are buying from the spammers are trying to breed.

It needs to stop. All you need is the right software... right?

Some people believe that the software companies that create the Virus and Spam blocking software are also the ones creating the Viruses and Spam. To an extent, this is true. Some brainiac figured out that if they send you a popup message telling you that you have a virus but "Click Here and we will clean your system for you", the innocent/ignorant users of the world will "click here". F'in Brilliant! Bastards, they were right.

In the last two weeks I've been chasing viruses and spyware because someone got into our system and dumped 30+ viruses on us. From there it traveled through our network to some vulnerable computers. Thankfully it didn't get to most of our systems because they were patched. But the older Windows 2000 systems got the worst of it.

I downloaded a free virus protection called "AVG" to do the initial cleaning of the viruses since my corporate edition was, apparently, sucking wind. AVG did a phenomenal job. I'm now talking to my company about purchasing the corporate edition for the servers and the work stations. One thing I really like about companies like Grisoft (AVG maker) is they feel it is their duty to help the average home user, thus they make the software free for home users. It's easy to use and they have a spyware version that is free as well. Grisoft is, in my opinion, one of the White Hat guys. They help keep the internet and it's users to be safe from the dingleberries who would like to cause havoc just because they can or to try and make a quick buck.

Kudos to Grisoft!! (and others like them). Symantec, Macafee and other similar companies are all out for the big $$. Renew every year to stay protected (for a price) and "maybe" they will find the viruses and cure them. 9 times out of 10 any software I have used could find the virus but could not "cure" or "heal" it. Plus they managed to slow my systems down to a crawl.

Well, for what it is worth, the dickhead that hacked into our system helped me in a few ways:

1. I lost 10 pounds by not eating or sleeping for a week and a half
2. I am now an alcoholic and my local liquor store is giving me discounts
3. I have a full, accurate inventory of all the computers in my company
4. I found some really neat games installed on users systems
5. I was able to reinforce our internet policy and write up the people I didn't like because they had installed games and Instant Chat software on their systems
6. I've always gotten a little thrill at typing "format c:"
7. Even the owner of the company is leaving me alone, for now. I'm sure his son's laptop needs to be tweaked before he goes off to college again.

If one more person tells me that this kind of stuff ensures "Job Security" the sledge hammer is coming out.