Windows 7: Look what I found

I scanned a customer's USB drive yesterday and found this.



I know some might say it is absurd or even riddled with false positives but he has installers from torrents in his drive so I believe the find was legit.

Bottom line is, false positive or not, I'm thankful I'm using Kaspersky.

Wow, how did it even boot up?

Probably really slowly....

That I don't know. And some even complain that it takes a long time to scan their USB drive. They bring an 8gb USB drive full of installers (probably from torrent sites) and all I need to open is a PSD or CDR file. While the file I want is only small, I would not risk opening the drive without finishing the scan first (again). Why again? I did that before just to satisfy an irritating customer (who was whining why 10mins have passed and Kaspersky is still scanning). What did I get? I had to reformat my computer the next day.

They ask me why is it long? I ask them which is longer - a scan or a reformat?

Advice him (for the future) to make image backup his system (clean) parition. Reformat in that case scenario is outdated these days

Hope they don't share the drive

Unfortunately, this is becoming more and more commonplace. I've seen it too many times when I go to look at someones PC and they have no AV, or the defs are out of date by months, or in one case, 1 1/2 years.

A decade ago, you could barely get away with relying on the "automated scans" to take care of everything. That's not the case nowadays. Owning a PC in today's hostile web environments demands vigilance on your part.

One of my Wife's family members had a PC with approx 700 infections on it. They did not have a Windows Disk and the recovery sector was corrupted, so my options were limited. It took a recovery boot disk approximately 6 hours to clean it.

Well in my part, vigilance is my key in keeping my system clean. I cannot lecture my customers regarding computer security for they mostly are noobs (not in a bad way of saying it). All they use the computer for is do some Office documents and surf the internet. They think they are protected just because they have an AV installed (which they don't update or scan).

My mom has a government issued laptop and she always comes to me and complain why her laptop is so slow when I just cleaned and performed maintenance on it a few weeks ago. The culprit? Their network. As she logs on to work using her laptop, she connects to their network (along with her co-workers who are also noobs) and immediately gets infected immediately.

Why does she come to me when they have their own IT department? They have to make an appointment first before the IT department can clean her laptop as they have their hands full with her co-worker's laptops. No matter how much the IT department lecture them or give tips on how to maintain their laptops, they fall on deaf ears or they are too busy with their work to take time to learn them.

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Blacklisting is really becoming a lost art because so many new forms of malware and viruses are created every day, and many big companies still focusing on blacklisting. Of course no AV is 100%, but since so many threats surface at a high rate AV's that focus on a blacklist really aren't that effective as they use to be.

Whitelisting and prevention is the key. It's much more effective to whitelist all known safe applications, and then block everything else.

Prevention and whitelisting is why I use Comodo. The Defense + and Sandbox features really add more proactive security that prevent a lot of bad things from installing, damaging essential registry keys and windows files, and etc. Of course a lot of people complain about the constant notifications and firewall popups for permission and such - but I'd rather do all that then coming to my PC one day and having 500+ infections like in your situation.