Dave Naffziger’s Blog

One of our marketers (who shall remain nameless), decided to ‘pimp my laptop’ while I was away from my desk.

She started with a unicorn and rainbow image on the desktop. She moved on to a Pamela Anderson screensaver, and was on her way to sending a few choice emails to coworkers from my email client.

Uh oh… a screensaver? Nothing says “spam me” more than a screensaver install. Especially a Pamela Anderson Screensaver .

I’d expect my grandmother to install a screensaver, and probably even my dad. However, the a marketer at an Internet firm? Whose husband works at Microsoft?

Uh oh. Here’s the McAfee SiteAdvisor report for the domain the screensaver came from. I’ll save you the suspense, it had this image on it:

Spybot found a Trojan, Kuasio.ka, a new Trojan that only had entered the definition files less than a month ago. However, Spybot didn’t find the program, just the registry entries. After install, the Trojan disabled Windows firewall (and notifications of course). I don’t know what it did from there, but once XP has been violated it is virtually impossible to guarantee that its clean.

So, I’m on Vista now. If you’re thinking about doing a clean install on your laptop, don’t. Drivers were missing, programs don’t run right (I had the biggest issues with Firefox and Gaim) and after a day of hacking around, I still don’t have my environment fully set up yet.

Now, I just need to figure out an appropriate response.