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Our Blogs Open Sauce The wonders of Windows: worms, worms, worms
Our Blogs Open Sauce The wonders of Windows: worms, worms, worms | The wonders of Windows: worms, worms, worms |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Tuesday, 06 January 2009 | |
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Page 2 of 2 Once worms have gained entry to Windows, one has to assume the role of scavenger or else go to a price-gouger who services Windows machines. You can find these people with ease but you have to part with more than just a few dollar notes to get your PC back in shape. Featured Whitepaper
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The process of cleaning up worms is exhausting and time-consuming - simply because, while Windows has little innovation to boast of, those who write these worms innovate rapidly to ensure that their contributions continue to reside on your PC, no matter what you try to remove them. Godzilla leaves files in the root of every drive, the Windows folder, and also rewrites the boot.ini file to make sure that, unless completely cleaned out, it regenerates every time one reboots. And with each new avatar, Godzilla adds a few little entries to the Windows registry - an enormous, unwieldy, single point of failure on the system - which often go undocumented by the willing souls who write up the methods of removal of these worms and post them on the web. After the removal - which took the better part of two hours - one has to regenerate the boot.ini using the Windows CD from which the installation was done. If you have only a system recovery CD or an update CD, good luck, it can't be used. There are hundreds of applications to remove spyware from a Windows PC; one of the better known apps, Spybot, lists more than 300,000 for which it checks. Whew! Despite all the emphasis on graphical user interfaces, when it comes to jobs like regenerating the boot.ini file, Windows uses the command line. Windows users often deride the Linux command line, yet when it comes to system-critical jobs, even their god, Microsoft, prefers two-finger typing to dumb double-clicks. Wonder why. The Mac may well be a proprietary system but, boy, you never find anything half this painful when it comes to administration. From the safety of a Linux box, one can only look on and laugh. |
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