Apologies to my handful of readers, for not posting according to my usual rhythm – quite a lot has happened as of late, although I haven’t had a great deal of time to properly mull things over, since I’ve been relatively burnt out.
That aside, I’d like to rant about something that’s made life Hell for myself, fellow college students and even staff, over the past few months – Conficker.
I’ll probably receive some flack over this post, if an incompetent Network Nazi “a highly qualified, professional staff member” (such a thing is rare at this organisation) stumbles upon it, although I’m beyond caring at this stage.
Despite much tub-thumping over self-serving placebo security measures, that end up driving productivity into the ground; this maligned pest has made itself ubiquitous, and made this an everyday occurrence:
As a result, myself and others spend hours each day using tools such as multiple AV applications (usually either an existing copy of Sophos AV – if it still functions, the free-of-cost AVG product, or Avira’s free-of-cost product), WinRAR, Midnight Commander, and Microsoft’s own Malicious Software Removal Tool to remove the offending files (most of which have the System and Hidden FAT FS attributes set), deposited by the malware from our USB Mass Storage devices.
Some of my fellow students enquire about malware removal several times a day (and see the SysAdmins anything up to 6 times per-day), and try hard to keep their UMS devices clean – before they become reinfected within 30 seconds of mounting them on the rather suspicious LAN clients; and others have resorted to bringing their own laptops in order to work.
I don’t foresee this being resolved any time soon , but one thing is for sure – we need all the help and luck we can get, to keep it at bay…
Tyson Key's Outpost 