Winblows—A virus Magnet?
Well we all know that windows is extremely virus prone, but before I go into my experience, I’ll explain why *nix is better. Permissions, it is all about the permissions. In windows any program RUN BY ANY USER can update the registy. It would be fairly easy for me to write a registry crashing program and distribute it to some random idiots. In Linux, the permission structure is much more strict. There are certain files, that are by default, only editable by root, and also certain commands that only root can execute. In winblows, any user has the power to do anything. This is not a good thing. A virus will run either as the user logged on, or it can even add itself as a service, and be run as system. The permissions, is the biggest reason that windows is not immune against viruses, but I think it is right to also take some time discussing the registry. In winblows, there is a “central” configuration file called the registry. This file has all of your system setting and settings for a lot of programs, along with a lot more(stored aim passwords for one…). Having one configuration file for all of that is just asinine! In *nix, there are many different files.
Getting back to my problem…I have had a winblows problem lately. Winblows would randomly crash at times and cause the computer to reboot. I had Tyler come over to reinstall windows with me. When first I booted after the reinstall, all went fine. It was on the next reboot AFTER INSTALLING NETWORK DRIVERS that everything went back to insanity. We believe I was infected with some kind of work (sasser?). Some of the worms we looked at are spread by a server that finds computers and exploits a windows vulnerability. This makes sense because when I first began encountering this problem, I opened up ethereal and looked at all of my traffic. There was traffic with an IP address I could not identify. It occurred a few times, and I am positive that it is nothing that I was using. The totally perplexing thing in all of this is how I was re-infected right after installing windows again. Everything is fine now. I installed again and have not yet installed the network drivers. I have anti-virus running now, but I am afraid to install the drivers.
On the better side of things: I have the core backend for sickofschool finished!!! I was too lazy to make another template, So I stole the one from this blog. I had to get rid of certain nice features due to Client Side scripting incompatibilities. >:o. One of the bigger things I need to work on is a “staging server” I have been using my computer, but I do not have a MySQL user with the correct name. It is a pain in the ass to have to change certain values when uploading the script, so I need to perfectly mirror the environment on the server. Creating MySQL users is proving to be a challenge.