Cobbett: Malware Wars

Had I not been busy daydreaming of dragging its creator through fields of salt-tipped broken glass, I might have been impressed by the bit of malware that squirmed its way onto my games machine this month. As a bit of software engineering, it’s right up there with the systems that launched the space shuttle, or the robot that squirts all those little holes into the Wispa bars. Only slightly less friendly...

Before you ask, no. My games machine doesn’t have any anti-virus software on it, or any other defensive layers. My regular machines do, but they have files and applications I care about. This one exists to get clogged up with everything under the sun, and routinely wiped when the boot-up process gets longer than the complete works of Dostoyevsky. Every couple of months, to be exact. The only surprising thing about it getting infected with the techno-lurgy is that it doesn’t happen more often.

I’m not sure where this particular strain came from. A quick Google suggested it usually hangs out on the kind of website I’m fairly sure I don’t take my computer on a romantic date to, so either it’s getting revenge for the time I’ve been spending around that shameless Netbook hussy I picked up for Christmas, or it’s decided to see other geeks on the side.

It would explain where all the Coke cans came from...

The malware introduced itself politely, early on Saturday afternoon, with a fake Windows Firewall message. A good one, too. If you don’t know that Microsoft isn’t in the habit of apologising for not being able to fix things, and doesn’t typically send you off to buy some other company’s software, you’re going to be impressed. Here though, the battle lines were drawn. How tricky could one little bit of malware be?

Famous last words.

It quickly became obvious that the slippery little bugger had its tentacles buried in everywhere. Firefox and IE loaded with another fake warning about a fake virus alert and the same desperate plea to go buy some crapware. It reminded me of Windows XP back in its first couple of weeks on the shelves, when users were constantly innundated with annoying little pop-up messages advertising overpriced programs to kill annoying little pop-up messages. Trying to navigate to any of the standard malware killer sites was a non-starter. Typing in the usual URLs to malware-busting software meant an instantly closed browser. No error message. No ceremony. No finger wagging. Boom. Gone.

"Your move," my nemesis chortled.

Not a problem, I thought. I have five PCs.  And yes, they helped. A bit. I managed to get an anti-malware tool across, but the fake firewall promptly defanged it by wiping its collection of definitions and killing the update process whenever it went out to get new ones. Even when everything was manually smuggled onto the system and camoflaged as ‘notmalwarekillerhonest.zip’ (just to be safe) three separate programs cheerfully gave the system a clean bill of health, marred only by the fake Windows Firewall message obscuring their triumphant thumbs-up.

In the end, I admitted defeat, and ran System Restore. It survived that too. Even now, one complete reformatting and reinstall later, I keep half-expecting to see the mocking message spring back up onto the screen and resume its taunting ways. I hope not, but I’m keeping a bell, book and candle nearby just in case. If the impromptu exorcism fails, the whole thing’s going to have to be buried in consecrated ground. Apparently this is a one-click process in the new versions of McAfee and Norton.

It’s no wonder that malware and spyware and viruses are such a problem. Even if you know what you’re doing, the original creators know your battleplan and are always ready to update theirs with a new wave of more advanced evil. When only a tiny fraction of a percent of victims is needed to draw a profit, what hope do the rest of us have? One thing's for sure. If they ever catch the guy who wrote it, I'll bring the salt...