Brace yourself

**GroundZero3** · March 26th, 2009, 05:00 PM

It surprises me that people still dont patch their boxes, even with legit copies

Beware Conficker worm come April 1 : Christopher Null : Yahoo! Tech

EXreaction · March 26th, 2009, 05:38 PM

I bet you wouldn't believe that at our tech school, pretty much all the computers I've tested have a backdoor trojan installed that gets transferred around via usb key.

All of the computers in the networking tech lab I am in are all infected and have deepfreeze installed on.

Luckly I've been using Vista on my laptop, so I could stop it before it would try to do anything when I would plug the usb drive back into my machine. But I didn't notice it until I tried plugging the USB drive into another machine with an anti-virus installed (happened to be some other systems in the school that had mcafee installed).

**GroundZero3** · March 26th, 2009, 06:15 PM

I have worked for three different school divisions trust me I know all to well

The biggest problem and this goes for any environment with software loads, you don't know how those new updates will effect all your software. The man power alone to test how the update will affect installed (espically when ms was releasing them every other week) would be virtually impossible.

EXreaction · March 26th, 2009, 07:07 PM

Well, luckily pretty much all the hardware setups here are identical, so one should be able to setup a single install and clone it to all the machines.

**GroundZero3** · March 26th, 2009, 07:17 PM

Yes but after you clone those machines you need to deploy the updates, and trust me even if they are all the same those updates can act screwy (not loading properly, network issues, etc) and cause some issues with the machine operation/software.

And just because all the machines are identical, they might not have all the same software. Some school district only install math software in math class rooms.

So its a very complicated animal, you cant just have wsus running and think everything will update perfectly fine.

EXreaction · March 26th, 2009, 10:21 PM

It's definitely something I'd like to try some day.

Although I may get the opportunity at some point in doing that with the computer lab we have in our classroom. I suppose I could give it a try with a bunch of VM's sometime, but doing that is no fun.

**GroundZero3** · March 26th, 2009, 10:22 PM

Why not? Vms are pretty much next to the best thing and you can do it all on one machine!

I do everything in vms

EXreaction · March 26th, 2009, 10:38 PM

Eh, I don't know, I just don't like doing all that in VM's.

Although I suppose it would be nicer on my desktop, I've only been trying that stuff on my laptop, which isn't as nice to work with (especially with the 5400 RPM hard drive).

Coolzer · March 27th, 2009, 07:24 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by EXreaction

I bet you wouldn't believe that at our tech school, pretty much all the computers I've tested have a backdoor trojan installed that gets transferred around via usb key.

Hey Ex just out of interest, how did you remove the Trojan?

**GroundZero3** · March 27th, 2009, 11:03 AM

Protecting Against the Rampant Conficker Worm - PC World