Viruses and Trojans....Can someone explain???

[cmputrskillme]

Hello Everyone, long time no see. Having a 16 month old is tough and I cannot get on here for my own pleasure as much as I'd like to. Its good to be back and to say hello!

I've had several computer jobs this weekend and while I made pretty good birthday money these past two days I feel terrible about it. One of these machines had a mind of its own (went to do a house call and said, "um, I gotta take this thing home it's hosed up big time.") Brought it home to find that it had 77 trojan horse viruses on it and over 200 peices of spyware/malware/crapware on it. The next day, another of my customers calls and says, "this thing won't boot, says it can't find C Drive and the windows cd won't repair it, just sits and spins."

Good god, I bet this one has 'em too. Sure enough, hes got not one but 5 boot sector viruses!!!!!

I write this because first I feel bad that these people seem to be so clueless as to their choice, or the lack thereof, of virus protection. Either they buy Norton's (which doesn't do diddley for trojans as far as I see!) and don't ever update it, or they don't have one at all. These people are clueless as far as spyware goes and their browsers are hijacked to the point where you can view nothing for trying to get all the popups out of the way. I know this, NO MACHINE, BUILT AND SOLD or REPAIRED LEAVES MY HOUSE WITHOUT VIRUS PROTECTION, A FIREWALL and AD-AWARE 6 ON IT!!!!! It is included in the price and the customers must pay for it. In their warranty and info sheets they get a quick lesson on maintenance, viruses and spyware.

My question is this, I never really understood how trojans and viruses work. Is there somewhere I can go here on the net to get educated on just how they get into the machine, what they do? Book I can buy? I'm sure many of you seasoned guru's out here whom have helped me countless times to solve some really weird problems (yeah, they only end up at my office door!) would know where I can go to get educated on these menacing things. While 90% of my repairs are because of viruses/trojans, I really don't fully understand how they work.

Thanks for listening,
Sharon

[efc]

Same here. Most computers I work on these days, are choked with spyware, trojans and viruses.

[Conan]

http://www.techzonez.com/forums/showthread.php?t=13780

and

http://www.techzonez.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9739

[FastGame]

Moved to security

[Curio]

Modern virii tend to be of the 'blended threat' type - at least the famous ones. A security hole in some part of the system is discovered and some kind soul writes an exploit for it. An exploit is a way of exploiting this new vulnerability to get the computer to do whatever you want (execute arbitrary code). The next step is that someone uses the exploit as part of another program which does bad things to your pc (the arbitrary code in question) commonly nowadays it will infect the PC with a viral component, IRC bot and or Remote Access Trojan. Part of the bad code then starts doing port scans on the network interface and attatching to any new computers it can find that are vulnerable to the exploit. As long as one pc is infected there will be scans going out on the net looking for more victims, that's why you get scanned all the time in the firewall logs. This type of virii doesn't need any interaction from the user whatsoever, they just connect to the net and within a few minutes they are toast.

[Fenalaar]

Hmm - My current job is about to go down the drain due to large-scale enterprise economies (so-called rationalizing), so I'm considering starting out for myself.

Now, I already have one signup for perhaps 10-20% of my time, so I need something to fill up the rest of my time (as well as my coffers :) )

I suddenly got the idea - how about offering service agreements for private people ?

Say $150-$200-$300? as a startup fee (mostly to clean out the crap and cover the cost of say Norton antivirus, as well as installing Firefox, thunderbird, a shitload of anti-spyware stuff, updating windows and ghosting a new install CD) and then a monthly fee of say $40 or $50 that covers a few service visits a year, a bit of phone support and such, and a reduced price for time used beyond what's included in the deal.

Say 50 customers at $50 a month, and we're talking about $2500... If you learn people to stay away from Exploder and Outhose Express and use Firefox and Thunderbird instead, the time actually spent fixing those pcs should be minimal...

Johan-Kr

[Fenalaar]

Of - btw... I got the idea after hauling Coolwebsearch out of the registry of a friends PC by the hair, as well as removing a load of spyware and 4-5 porndiallers...

Johan-Kr

[cash_site]

It is a great idea Fenalaar... i did a bit of that on/off through last year... had a couple of regular clients for 2 hours each per week... to keep computer up to scratch, support, and general teaching of using computer... Would do one off fix ups via word-of-mouth phone calls... depending on your intended market ;) it could be quite lucaritive... I just missed out on getting a contract with a welfare group (not bad considering i was doing this as spare time from full-time job ;) )

ps. Techies who bill per hour LOVE it when a new virus is released (blaster/sasser paid for some little upgrades) :D