Thursday 14 June 2012

infection

I seem to have caught a trojan (or two) and I'm trying to get rid of them, which proves quite time-consuming. I shan't be able to post anything because I simply don't have the time.

Does anyone by any chance know how to reactivate the menu which normally pops up when you right-click a hard disk letter (e.g. C) or a folder name in the explorer? When I try to do this nothing happens. I have WIN XP with SP3 installed. My vague guess is that something went wrong in the registry.

Any suggestions, links etc. are appreciated.

I've found a solution to my 2nd problem - the one about the missing context menus in the WIN Explorer:
I had to 'hack' the registry. Somehow (maybe caused by the trojans) an entry had disappeared from the registry. I had to browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer, create the key 'NoViewConextMenu' and assign it the REG_DWORD value '0'. This makes context menus become visible again.

As regards my Trojan 'friends' I've caught two of them.

6 comments:

  1. Take care. It's a nasty world the other side of the modem.

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    1. @Sidney: One has to take great care indeed when one travels the digital world, especially when one travels off the trodden paths. I had my firewall up and an antivirus watchdog patrolling, and yet it happened! But I think my counterstrikes were successful.

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  2. Petr,

    I admire your courage for venturing into the quagmire that is the registry. You are a braver man than I!

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  3. @John, thanx for the compliment, but it isn't that much of a bravery! First, you save the registry on a different partition of your harddisk, then you mess around with the registry, next pray to God, Allah, Buddha or some other god(dess) you believe in (don't ask me what atheists should do) and then reboot the system.

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    1. Maybe atheists just take a deep breath. You also have variants like never opening the recipe while looking at a black cat, although a few might after throwing salt over a preferred shoulder. Some Christians would believe it presumptuous to imagine that God might want to help them out from their own mess and see it as a form of penance instead.

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  4. "recipe" should be "registry" of course, a Freudian metaphor for what you do there

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