Lately I have been confronted by Windows machine administration again, mostly at home. I thought I had setup everything so that it does most things that I authorized, and all the others where difficult questions that no one actually understands (And thus reports to me before taking actions). Sadly one of the machines didn’t seem to enjoy that part of my game and decided to go on a trip of his own. It was immediately visible through Internet Explo{r|d}er, a bogus application was loaded and some interesting products where running in the Windows Taskbar / Taskmanager. You where not allowed to kill them (bright ray of light should shine on you now) so something really fishy going on. (SIMBAR is one of the bogus applications btw; a lot of people have that enabled, and still wonder why they are getting those strange spamish messages on screen, oh well it’s all about being carefull!)I decided to install my trustworthy Hitman Pro (www.hitmanpro.nl yeah seems to be developed by a countryman) and installed all the suggested applications. Soon more then 100 bogus entries in the registry and files were discovered.I’ll guess I need to start informing my people again (at home, and around me). BE CAREFUL IN WHAT YOU INSTALL, will be the motto. I will also try and find some applications that can properly defend the perimeter in my home and for the people around me, so that they dont have much to say about what is installed, and should ask around first. This might reduce the user experience, but can save me a lot of time :-) Oh well, lets get rid of this junk and play with MacOSX, and my FreeBSD servers again ;-)   (more…)