How often do the **** who sneak all those pop up things on your computer get caught?
What punishment do they receive?
Does anyone know one of these people and their address so I can break their legs?

Stop clicking on porn.

I tried to open my Auto Aid breakdown cover certificate.
Niche uber hard core porn.

Not that often unfortunately. Many of them operate in countries where policing is difficult and they’re certainly always going to be extremely difficult to track down and convict. At best it’s usual to catch the techies manufacturing the stuff but mr big will always be many hops away from those guys.

You should probably avoid trying to track them down for a good beating. Many of of culprits are tightly linked to Russian/American/Chinese crime syndicates. They’ve found it’s far more profitable and risk-free to coherce geeks to do this stuff for them rather than robbing banks and stuff but I’m sure they’ve still got access to lots of large men with guns who used to work for the army.

You need windows defender, malwarebytes and then ccleaner. Run em all as a deep scan/nuke mode.

Mr outandabout, Sir I salute your photographs and your wonderful life style but being a computer Luddite I have no idea what you are talking about!
We’ve got windows defender.

Malwarebytes (google/search) will remove the nasties as will CCCleaner, programmes designed to do this job.
Both are probably free (not sure about cccleaner as I’ve not had to use it) and are most likely run in the order Matt lists them to clean the crud from your system. Defender doesn’t catch everything on it’s own.

just get a mac.

CCleaner isn’t designed to, nor will it, remove nasties. Its just a cleanup tool.
Malwarebytes will do the job coupled with decent AV software.

jam bo – Member

just get a mac.
Bit of an expensive solution just to get rid of a bit of malware though.

So a mac is safe from all this stuff?
The time and aggravation we have sorting this stuff out means that a one off nuclear option would be most welcome.

TBH the maccies always bleat on virus & malware on windows machine. Yes they are targetted more by the fact they are the most common OS out there. But, I dont tend to get any problems. There are a couple of reason for this.
Up to dat AV and anti-malware on the PCs I use.
Use a bit of common sense and dont click on unexpected pop ups, dont open e-mail attachments if you dont trust the source of the e-mail.

Mostly its common sense. If something seems not right, it probably isn’t.

Bit of an expensive solution just to get rid of a bit of malware though.

Yeah but it also makes you more attractive & able to ride your bike faster, so on balance I think they’re good value.

Use Microsoft Security Essentials, Google for it and download it from Microsoft.

This will probably get most of the stuff you’ve got. CCleaner is a bit of a extreme step and can brick your PC if you don’t know what you’re cleaning.

Also uninstall all browser extensions you’ve got.

Now that’s what my Mum’s computer looked like. I was there and asked to use her computer and the whole screen filled with popups and extensions. When I asked her about it she said the man who looks after her computer (you know, instead of asking me), said that they were just part of owning a computer and you have to live with them.

So I spent about three hours cleaning it up.

Next visit, the computer is back to popup land because he’s been back, uninstalled MSE and then proceeded to re-install some dodgy search bar that brings all this crap in.

So what’s the forum opinion of AVG then? It seems to do ok for me.

Now that’s what my Mum’s computer looked like.

And my teenage daughter’s. She’s now go Ubuntu installed – and no admin password.

Macs are safer as less people are using them – there’s nothing inherently safer about them (or Linux). (There used to be, but since XP SP2 there’s not a great deal of difference…)

AVG works OK, I have it on my Windows laptop. Doesn’t seem to get in the way.

AVG = Resource hog nowadays.
MSE is much less intrusive and resource hungry.

Macs are safer as less people are using them – there’s nothing inherently safer about them (or Linux). (There used to be, but since XP SP2 there’s not a great deal of difference…)

that simply isn’t true, Windows has taken some great steps forward but they are post xp more windows 7 and server 2008. they do still suffer from not sand boxing applications well and it’s inherently easier to get remote code execution to run with privileges on Windows then linux/osx/unix/as400 etc. that being said any systems can be poorly setup and maintained to increase the attack surface.

even though I run one, i was tongue in cheek when i suggested a mac.

any system can be compromised. the single biggest risk to any computer is the idiot sat in front of it.

Samuri – any reason (since I know that you know about this stuff), you haven’t set your mum up as a non-admin user and then not told this guy the pw for the admin account?

And my teenage daughter’s. She’s now go Ubuntu installed – and no admin password.

passworded the bootloader too I hope 🙂

and the bios, as i would just boot off removable media, copy the shadow file off the hdd as it’s not got full disk encryption then crack all the passwords at leisure.

passworded the bootloader too I hope

It’s her computer, if she decides to screw it up any further it’ll soon become her problem…

if you don’t password the bootloader its very easy to reset the root password, like 60seconds on google and typing a couple of words level of easy.

Apologies is you already knew this.

purpleyeti – Member
and the bios, as i would just boot off removable media, copy the shadow file off the hdd as it’s not got full disk encryption then crack all the passwords at leisure.

POSTED 51 MINUTES AGO # REPORT-POST

And in English ?

Downloading porn makes the pop-ups come alive.

bois (basic input output system) is the controller that manages the first stages a computer system start up, called post (power on self test) this then finds all the hardware and then start the operating system start up. Normally by reading the boot sector of the hard disk drive.
You can interrupt the post and get is to search of a boot sector on another piece of media like cd or usb with a mini bootable version of linux running on it, once this is booted you can then read the hard disk unless it has beed fully encrypted.
once you can read the disk you can navigate to the file /etc/shadow that holds the hashed passwords on most common linux systems. From this you can run a standard brute force program that will return the plain text password.

And in English ?

making a copy of where linux stashes user/password info and having a play with it, separate from the live system, to figure out the passwords. Probably not something to worry about your kids doing on the family PC.

depends i know i was doing that when i was younger, some of my colleagues are now having similar issues as their children have grown up using computers daily and been around security folk long enough to pick up a lot of knowledge.

Why brute force, when you can just hack another file to escalate privileges? Can frig the sudoers file or groups and gain admin privileges with the normal user password.
I know 14yr old kids that would have enough Linux knowhow to do that.
And isn’t the BIOS password resettable just by fiddling with a jumper on the mobo?

edit: but they’d probably forget that root logins are logged 😉

[quote]

any system can be compromised. the single biggest risk to any computer is the idiot sat in front of it.[/quote]

I just want to know more about the mystery man who comes and services Samurais mums computer?

Why brute force, when you can just hack another file to escalate privileges? Can frig the sudoers file or groups and gain admin privileges with the normal user password.
I know 14yr old kids that would have enough Linux knowhow to do that.
And isn’t the BIOS password resettable just by fiddling with a jumper on the mobo?

edit: but they’d probably forget that root logins are logged

i avoided the add user or “sudo all nopasswd” as they are easy to spot, yes best way would be to change it so there was a setuid 0 copy of bash you could run as and when you wanted

purpleyeti if my kids ever get to the stage where they can do that then they’ve earned root privileges as far as I’m concerned 🙂

Or are your colleagues worried about their kids finding their porn stash?

And isn’t the BIOS password resettable just by fiddling with a jumper on the mobo?

unless you padlock the chassis, if you have physical access to the computer you can normally get into unencrypted systems without too much trouble, most stuff is to protect from bad guys on the outside and idiots on the inside.

Or are your colleagues worried about their kids finding their porn stash?

i think it’s more damaging the system or doing anything online that could cause them trouble, also strong user separation stops the “my 8 year old son bought a jcb for £1.5 million on ebay” stuff.

I’ll wait a few more years and see if once they are more responsible and if they are granted rights then, otherwise it might just be the porn stash issue.

you haven’t set your mum up as a non-admin user and then not told this guy the pw for the admin account?

She lives an hour away and I would find myself driving down there very regularly if I took admin control of her PC. I suppose I could activate remote support. Seems more fun this way.

I’ve never met the mystery man Kimbers. He could or course be a figment of my mum’s imagination. My mum’s husband has interrogated me at length about Linux because he used to get me to fix his computer every time I went down there. I installed Linux and open office. He’s not needed to ask me for help since.