Somewhat OT: Spyware or Cancerous Software?

[Jack]

Was just repairing a clients Windows machine
yesterday.
The spyware infection reminded me more of a cancer
than anything else. If you don't get every last bit
you'll get reinfected. The worst part is this
malicious code puts itself in the registry, and with
the ability to hide registry entries and to hide files
from the file managers, cleaning may not be possible
unless you know how to unhide this stuff.
While the same can be done with Linux by replacing
certain system tools, there is no registry to deal
with.
This is itself a great boost to cleaning an infected
Linux system. There is no need to scour a registry
looking for cryptic keys, that have no relationship to
the infecting program(s). This is a great asset, since
this particular system had been infected since July!
Hence even were he to have kept backups of the
registry, it is unlikely he'd still have a
pre-infection copy of the registry. While it is a nice
idea to have a central database where one can
configure everything on the system, it was an
extremely bad idea to make it so cryptic and
accessible for abuse.

Anyway that's my thought for the day. Avoid the cancer
that Windows has become, use Linux.

P.S. This one spyware program made over 200 entries in
the registry, had over 1600 copies of bits of itself
hidden in various locations (each of which were enough
to spawn a new infection), and was running about 40
copies of itself in memory (thus maxing out the CPU
whenever the infected user logged in).


Brian JD