Second Amendment Blog
Holiday Blogging
Posted by: Sebastian on 
Dec 17th, 2007 | 
Filed under: Personal
I will be blogging, in all likelihood, over the holidays, while I’m in Roanoke with Bitter, Bitchy Mom, and family, but I can’t promise it’ll be on any kind of schedule. Bitter and I are also planning a trip to Knoxville the Saturday after Christmas to spend some time with the Uncles, and hopefully a few other K-ville bloggers.
My schedule this week is going to be tight too. Work is going to be rough, because I have a lot to do before the holidays, and today I came in to find out one of our machines that monitors lab equipment in real time had a massive trojan infestation. Because it monitors in real time, the manufacturers suggest not using virus software. Vendors that recommend this with Windows ought to be dragged out and shot, as a public service. If you’re going to make a real time application, please, please, don’t use Windows. Now I will have to take drastic measures to enforce technological measures so this won’t happen again. I really should have done that in the first place, but with only a dozen or so users, I figured “Be careful and don’t do anything stupid with this machine” would suffice. Fortunately, it’s not part of my domain, so the damage is contained, but it’s still a pain to get the damned thing back up and running.
December 17th, 2007 at 11:41 pm
Ah, so it was the users who did it… Here I thought it was somehow exposed on the network (to other infected machines) and it was just a Windows vulnerability.
You should just block all internet access with the hosts file. I suppose if it is a dedicated machine, it shouldn’t be used for anything else anyway.
So, what’d they download? Pr0n, games, or P2P?
December 17th, 2007 at 11:45 pm
Not sure how it got on there. I was too pressed for time to look too closely.
December 17th, 2007 at 11:58 pm
Hey, cool idea.
I was driving down on this Saturday and was going to stop in Knoxvegas. Its a short drive up from Chattanooga, if the schedule permits I might drive up to join you folks on the Saturday after Christmas.
December 18th, 2007 at 12:35 pm
Have you looked into the Barracuda spam firewall?
It’ll prevent email-based virii from getting into the company. Of course, that doesn’t stop web-based virii from getting in, but they make other products to mitigate that.
December 20th, 2007 at 12:31 am
A good way to wind up my wife is to mention putting a SCADA system on the internet…
December 20th, 2007 at 12:36 am
Oh, geez is it ever! My former incarnation was as a controls engineer and people do the dumbest things. Not every computer needs to be on the internet! *grumble*
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