oh god. so dumb.So I'm here trying to fix up my parents' computer. It's inexplicably riddled with viruses. Since I was planning on doing it anyway, I decided to wipe the harddrive and install XP. So I do. But when I boot it up, the virueses are still there! Worse, there are more of them. They can't be coming from the iBook, surely. I figured it must be lurking in the master boot record or something and the XP install just left it there. So I burned a Knoppix disc, zeroed the MBR, formatted the drive and ran the installer again. And there were still viruses. I've been doing this all day, pretty much. I've run the XP install at least five times. I couldn't figure it out. Maybe it was the router. I hooked up my wireless router while I was here. I like to be able to use the iBook over wireless so I don't have to fight for computer time while I'm home. I was running the Sveasoft custom firmware. Maybe that has known vulnerabilities or something. So I download the Linksys firmware. I look at the front of the router to see what the thing's version is. And I notice something. The DMZ light is on. Why's the DMZ light on? Uh... Crap. I checked. The address for the router had DMZ enabled and it was pointing to the IP address for my parents' machine. That pretty much explained the viruses. The router normally lives on my internal network. I must have turned the VPN on when I was messing with something at some point and forgot to turn it off. I have to say it's pretty amazing, though. A machine installing XP naked on the Internet is pretty thoroughly infected before the install finishes. Impressive. *sigh*
Oh well. Merry Christmas, everybody! ^_^ comments:
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