Windows woes

[Alex Stevenson]

Walter Bright wrote:
> Dave wrote:
>> In article <e0io88$22jc$2 at digitaldaemon.com>, Walter Bright says...
>>> Walter Bright wrote:
>>>> At this point, it was apparent that tech support had no idea why 
>>>> this was happening, and I was beginning to worry there was either a 
>>>> rootkit installed, or there was just creeping corruption going on. I 
>>>> gave up on Microsoft tech support, and decided to reinstall Windows.
>>> Turns out, I did have a trojan rootkit on my system. arrgh!
>>
>> Any idea how that happened / made it onto your system? (it has me 
>> worried that
>> virus scanning didn't pick it up).
> 
> I have no idea how it got on. Being a trojan, I must have run something. 
> I'm usually very careful about not running anything I am not sure of, 
> careful enough that this is the first virus/trojan I've had in 10 years.
> 
> I'm almost to the point of using a separate sacrificial machine for web 
> surfing.

VMware provide a "Browser Appliance" prebuilt virtual machine, I think 
it's just a minimal Ubuntu Linux plus Firefox. A VM just for web apps 
seems a little extreme to me, but it's probably not as extreme as using 
a dedicated machine and it's cheaper, VMware Player being free.