Second July

24 April 2008

Ubuntu saves the day

My brother and I are having this lil cold war thingy going on which started by him for not driving my family to A&W. So the hak yan zhang right him? I know.

So yesterday over dinner, he told me my computer got infected with some kinda virus and in turn his lappie got infected also. For a while I was celebrating (just a tiny bit) inside but then started worrying about it because that means there's something wrong with my beloved desktop lah. Last thing I want is to reformat my PC. Reformatting means endless hours of backing up equals infinite headache.

I on my dusty Ad-Aware later and they say my version of definitions is 400+ days old. In a good way, that means the last time I got infected and cared to have a scan is at least 400 days ago. This is made possible by me being a cautious web surfer ahem p0rn-free PC here. In a bad way, I have to reinstall the latest version.

After scanning and all, the culprit SOAB (pardon the abbreviation) is this trojan named kavo. Kavo is really effective in duplicating through portable media like USB thumb drives especially.

This trojan isn't really that harmful really except one of the few changes you might notice when you get infected is when you double click on your D: or C: drive, a new window browser will pop up for that drive (do yours?) . Seems harmless right? The other more serious symptom is it doesn't allow you to view hidden files/folders even after choosing not to hide them in your folder options menu. Terrible trojan it is.

Thirdly, the average free malware remover or antivirus product will not work in getting rid of Kavo, for one I read that Kaspersky doesn't, for two Ad-Aware definitely will not. By the way, Ad-Aware rated the trojan a threat index of 10 on a scale of 1 to 10.

So I did what a semi-geek would do under these circumstances. I searched high and low for a cure and landed on a Taiwan programme called Kavo Killer. Worked like a charm. No more new window pop-up and hidden files are not so hidden anymore.

Then the real problem came. My precious PSP, being a portable USB device it is, reinfected my PC when I plugged it to my PC after all that drama. In other words,


MY PSP IS INFECTED!!!!


Seriously at that time I thought my PSP was doomed. This is where Linux came in by the way. Again, being the semi-geek I am, I remembered this Linux-expert friend of mine aka ND telling me how Windows virus/trojans/SOAB will just appear as harmless crappy scripts in Linux. Wanna take a look at the SOAB's scripts? Be my guest.




Later I found out the trojan got into my Stone Plus also. Bummer. I would say the trojan has an active sex life in Windows while the Linux is like a freezer to them. They just froze in there.

You know what is a good way to take a revenge on your lazy groupmate and coincidently his thumb drive is in your hands? Just copy and paste these SOAB files from your Linux into his thumb drive and watch them grow. Seriously, I'm just joking lah.

Anyway, at the end of the day, with just an easy push of the 'delete' button, my PSP and Stone Plus are not so doomed anymore.

posted by: JYLing @ 9:56 AM

+ + +