Friday, January 1, 2010

Places to get infected

When it comes to humans, people might get infected in a virus while it is carried over the air. This means that there are places which are more susceptible for infections then the others, due to being crowded or contain many ill people.

With computer viruses, the situation is a little different. Put an infected computer near a "healthy" computer, and nothing will happen.

Today I was at the photo-printing shop with my disk-on-key. Nothing special, as we all print photos this way nowadays. When I got back home my DoK contained 7 new unrecognized .exe files, and an "autorun.inf" file. Hmmm... I don't remember putting those there. A quick virus scan, and viola, 7 torjans/droppers/viruses found their way to the DoK in the few minutes it was mounted at the computer at the photo-printing shop. Good thing I'm safe, but I guess many other get infected after printing their photos in this store. Ouch.

4 comments:

  1. I think the best option is to use protection. Next time just burn it on a CD, no way you'll get infected...

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  2. As I'm traveling for a while now with my portable hard drive, to store photos and music, one of my biggest problems is finding a computer at an internet cafe that both works and does not have a zillion viruses from all the people that sat there before me..

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  3. When it comes to public computers, putting your Dok in, is the equivalent of sleeping with an old prostitute... it works, but sorry later. :->

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  4. Jonathan and Leon, your comments make funny sense when put together: an old prostitute and "use protection" :).

    Leon - CDs are dead. Especially for personal use (unlike buying Xbox games). If not now, than soon.

    There are solutions that "fill" the DoK with nothing, so it can't get infected. But seriously, when coming to a Kiosk (like the computer at the photo printing) you'd expect the machine to be hardened and run a OS and OS-user that allows nothing. Especially, it shouldn't allow any user process to be executed. Damn, it doesn't even have a keyboard.

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