KDB Systems » Windows 7

Windows 7 and Malware

Kerry Brown — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:34:05 +0000

These past two weeks have been crazy for malware. I’m getting several phone calls a day about rogue security programs. These programs hijack your computer. The latest version is extremely hard to remove from XP. If Windows is running it’s near impossible. The malware gets into the system files and doesn’t let other programs run. I have to remove the hard drive and scan it with another computer. Then I re-install the hard drive and run more scans. This malware is constantly changing. The anti-malware scanners are always behind. I find it’s best to wait for two or three business days after receiving an infected computer before working on it so the anti-malware scanners will hopefully have the malware in their signatures. Yesterday I received an infected computer that was running Windows 7. Windows 7 was running with the default security settings. All the user accounts had passwords. The malware was the exact same as I’d had all the trouble with on XP computers. It took about five minutes to remove it in Windows 7. Because of the better security in Windows 7 the malware could not get out of the user account that clicked on the wrong web site. I had set this computer up. When I set up a computer I always set up a second administrator account with a strong password. This is especially important in Vista and Windows 7. If you only have one account and it gets corrupted it’s very hard to fix it. I logged in with the second account, loaded the infected users registry hive, deleted a couple of entries, and deleted the files those entries pointed to. I was then able to reboot into the infected users account with no signs of the malware. I waited a couple of days then ran several different scanners just to make sure. They did find a couple of dropper files in some temp folders. If those files had inadvertently been run the computer would have been infected again. I was very impressed with how well Windows 7 protected the computer. It’s impossible to stop every social engineering attack. Some people will always click on the wrong thing. Windows 7 with the default security settings did a great job of limiting the infection and making it easy to remove.

Repair Internet Explorer 8

Kerry Brown — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 15:12:28 +0000

One of the most frequent questions I see on the Microsoft Answers forums is about problems with IE8 being slow, crashing, or acting erratically. It’s usually caused by a plug-in. I was going to write a tutorial about how to troubleshoot this. During my research for the article I found this blog post by Ed Bott. It covers the topic very well.

Why you should upgrade to Windows 7

Kerry Brown — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 21:44:00 +0000

I usually don’t recommend everyone immediately upgrade to a new version of anything. I’m firmly in the wait for others to find the bugs camp. I like to run the latest myself but for paying customers if it ain’t broke why fix it. I don’t recommend they upgrade until version 1.1 or possibly with a hardware change. I’m changing this position for Windows 7. It’s not that different from Vista. Vista’s now at Service Pack 2 and is very stable. For whatever reason many people are still running XP. The security benefits of Windows 7 compared to XP far outweigh any cons about upgrading. The Internet is worse than the wild west was. Surfing the net with XP is like showing up at the OK Coral naked with a water pistol. It doesn’t matter what you do, you’re probably going to lose. When you do lose you will become a zombie bothering the local townies until they finally put you out of your misery. Windows 7 puts you in the game. You’ve got as good of a chance as the bad guys. For this reason alone Windows 7 is worth upgrading for. All the fancy UI, networking, media enhancements, etc, are just gravy. Security is the number one reason to upgrade. Heck, even the Linux and Mac crowd should be urging the Windows crowd to upgrade. The Internet will be a much better place when XP is forgotten.

Windows 7 vs. Fedora 11 — Part 1

Kerry Brown — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 17:18:00 +0000

I’m leaving this morning for a three day trip to Ottawa for a CIRA board meeting. I depend on my Blackberry and my laptop to run my business while I’m on the road. I’m going to do an experiment this trip. I’m going to run Fedora 11 exclusively on my laptop. I’ve always had a multi-boot setup on the laptop of Windows Desktop, Windows Server, and Linux. The current setup is Windows 7 Ultimate, Server 2008 R2, and Fedora 11. I’ve set the default boot to Fedora 11 and hope to keep it that way for the next three days. I’ve tried this in the past with various distros of Ubuntu and OpenSuse. Neither worked out. For some reason I always had to boot into Windows sometime during the road trip. It was usually something to do with Exchange or my Blackberry. I rely on my Blackberry and Exchange to manage my time, email, and basically my business. I’ll try to keep this blog up to date with my experiences and at the end I’ll post the results.

Windows 7, Vista, and the Blogoshpere

Kerry Brown — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 03:48:00 +0000

Windows 7 is about to hit the RTM milestone any day now. I’ve been playing with it since the public beta release last fall. I like it. As soon as it hits RTM I plan to install it in on both my laptop and desktop. I’ll only run Vista in virtual machines for testing. That said I can’t believe all the hyperbole about Windows 7. Yes, it has some nice new features but come on people it’s really not that different from Vista. The vast echo chamber of the blogosphere which dissed Vista is praising Windows 7 like it’s the second coming. I’ve been trying to analyse why.

Resistance to change and resistance to admitting you may be wrong is my best guess. Vista was a huge change from XP. I was in on the beta testing of Vista quite early. It was still called Longhorn. I knew immediately there was going to be a lot of resistance. It was actually reasonably secure and forced users and programmers into a better security model. Anyone remotely interested in security knows that increased security always means increased inconvenience. How often did we hear new Vista users saying things like “I’m the administrator dammit. I can look after my security myself.” Well you know what? 99.9% of us can’t. If you’re running XP it’s probably impossible. Amongst other things I enjoy figuring out how malware works. I don’t make much money at it but I remove malware for customers when I have time. I do this so I can see real world infections and figure out how the malware works. I see malware all the time on the computers of network administrators and highly sophisticated users. You want to know why this is? It’s because they run an insecure OS as administrator all the time. The programs they use expect to have administrator rights. The services and drivers running in the background have carte blanche to do whatever they want. XP is a security nightmare people became used to. There was no way to fix it thus Vista came into being. Vista while mitigating a lot of the problems forced everyone to change their habits in a way that wasn’t convenient. More importantly it took a while to figure out these changes. It took even longer for a moderately competent geek to figure out new ways to bend the OS to their will. Couple this with the fact that Vista required significantly more hardware than XP and it was a recipe for disaster. This caused much angst and bad press in the blogosphere. This angst was endlessly echoed until it was the “truth” that Vista was flawed. Once this “truth” was out there it was impossible for any blogger to argue against it. There is still no better way to get click throughs than by writing a blog that disses Vista and links to other blogs as proof. Many of the bloggers and experts over time learned that this “truth” wasn’t really true. They were afraid to say anything for fear of admitting they’d been wrong. Along comes Windows 7. It has a few cool new features. The UI has been tweaked a bit. It’s been highly optimized to appear faster to the user. Most people now have hardware capable of running Vista. Windows 7 runs great on this hardware. More importantly all the bloggers and moderately competent geeks can get up to speed very quickly as they already climbed the learning curve with Vista and it’s not Vista. They don’t have to admit they were wrong in order to say they like it. It’s a recipe for good press in the blogosphere.

Don’t get me wrong. I really like Windows 7. Some of the new features are really cool. The new taskbar is a huge improvement. Aero peek has become indispensible. The UI really is more intuitive most of the time. There are a few things I don’t like. The libraries feature is a great idea that isn’t fully implemented. It has tremendous potential but as it is implemented in Windows 7 it doesn’t work for me. The Homegroup networking feature is a security problem. It makes it very hard to share one folder in your profile. If you share a folder in your profile the whole \USERS tree is automatically shared. I had a good discussion about this with someone from Microsoft and in the end we agreed to disagree. He said the default ACLs and Access Based Enumeration locked down the folders well enough for home use. I felt they didn’t, especially for a very small business many of which run the Home version of Windows.

So what’s my conclusion? I’m somewhat grumpy about the fact that Vista will go down in history as Windows Me the second. The blogosphere is praising Windows 7 which will cause a lot of people to finally move away from XP. That’s a very good thing. The Internet will be a better place.