Re: [LINUX_Newbies] Re: Off topic but appreciated non Linux advice

My wife uses XP. Windows 7 would scare her. That's just the way it is. She
has limited skills and does not care to learn. She likes the familiarity of
XP. To give you an idea of the nature of the problem. She has no idea where
files are located. She saves some to the desktop, others to her My Documents
folder and several other random places. The only way that she can find them
is to open the programme that created them and then open them from recent
files. I am sure that you get the picture.

The way that many of these trojans now work is scary. They spoof legitimate
sites and have popups that show that you may have a virus that look like
they comes from Microsoft or whomever. Then when you click on them they
actually install the trojan. My wife has been getting a few of these popups
and told me about them. I told her not to click on them, but think that I
was already too late.

My hope is to clean up her hard drive and make a small Ubuntu partition to
do banking and online ordering on. I am not sure about income tax yet. That
will be a future project. I have already planted the seed and suggested that
she use my Linux desktop for now. Once she gets used to that then I will
suggest that she have her own. I got her to use Firefox and Thunderbird in
Windows so that is a good start.

My situation is not unlike those of many of us. We use Linux but others
regard us as geeks because we do and they do not want to use anything geeky.
It is hard to convince then that Linux is not geeky anymore.

Roy

On 4 May 2010 00:04, David Neeley <dbneeley@gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> Roy,
>
> I'm glad you followed my hunch that it might indeed be a rootkit. I've
> had clients with those before, so I have had to deal with them on
> several occasions myself.
>
> You would still be best advised to do a full reinstall from a clean,
> freshly formatted disk. If the rootkit authors were clever, they could
> have inserted a "back door" that would keep the system vulnerable.
>
> I don't recall if you said which version of Windows is on your wife's
> machine, but if it will support Win 7 that would probably be the best
> idea if she still insists upon running Windows--since that is what is
> getting nearly all of Microsoft's attention in security matters.
>
> It is still a very good idea to be sure she has a very good firewall,
> anti-malware and anti-virus programs in place and properly set. Even
> so, that will not protect the average user who tends to click on "OK"
> whenever a warning shows up from their security software.
>
> As your experience shows, some of these things take multiple products
> to find and eliminate. That should also make everyone realize that
> relying upon a single program for a particular aspect of security is
> not always a good idea.
>
> The other issue is that for a security program to be effective, it
> often must be quite sensitive--which in turn can lead to many false
> positives. In that case, the user is often lulled into thinking things
> are always false positives, and in turn that leads ignoring warnings.
>
> Keep trying to get her to shift to Linux!
>
> David
>
>
> --- In LINUX_Newbies@yahoogroups.com <LINUX_Newbies%40yahoogroups.com>,
> Roy <linuxcanuck@...> wrote:
> >
> > First the good news. It is gone. The bad news is that it was a rootkit as
> > someone suggested. I am crossing my fingers that no personal info was
> lost.
> >
> > I tried several Linux rescue CDs to no avail. It was clean as far as they
> > could tell. I then installed unhackme in Windows and it did the trick. It
> > found the rootkit but it took several tried and re-boots to remove it. I
> > hope that it is gone. I managed to re-install avg and the firewall, so
> that
> > at least is a positive sign.
> >
> > I hate Windows. Now that I have that off of my chest, I can get on with
> > enjoying Linux. I am in Sabayon tonight. Life is good!
> >
> > Thanks for your help and encouragement.
> >
> > Roy
>
>

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

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