Maintenance
Working from home today. Took advantage of that fact to drop off the Explorer for a brake job, and to install a new chat client on one of the elderly desktops.
I had been running AOL’s Instant Messenger on it, but there was a vulnerability somewhere in program–even in the latest versions–that was repeatedly inroducing the W32.Randex virus to the system. My anti-virus software was uptodate, so the bug wasn’t getting anywhere one it landed, and a visit to Shields Up verified that I didn’t have any untoward ports open, but it was annoying nonethless.
I finally traced the problem to AIM by running a virus check every few hours, first with every program I normally use other than AIM running, then with AIM alone running. Days went by with no infection attempts in the first case, yet literally almost as soon as I opened up AIM, up popped a quarantine notice. I’d cleanse and restart, and at least one new attempt would trigger the anti-virus software over the next couple of hours.
Why only one box out of the three occasionally running AIM on my local network was targeted, I don’t know, though admittedly it was the one where AIM was most likely to be running at any particular time. In any case, I’ve since replaced it with Trillian, which not only will connect to both AIM and the Yahoo chat client, but promises to be virus-free.
So far, so good. Better than I can say for the Explorer, which just added $700 in brake repair to the House Hraka debt load.