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Malicious Software?


Luc Solar

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Have you ever encountered "dangerous" software?

 

I'm not talking about basic viruses, but more like coding screw-ups and the likes that mess up you comp.

 

I remember when Pool Of Radiance II came out in 2001. It was buggy as hell and had also an interesting uninstall-feature: In some cases uninstalling the game from your hard drive wiped out your windows/system-files!!

 

Now if someone is uncertain about what happens to the OS when you get your system-files deleted...try it sometime. :D

 

(Don't, I'm just kidding!)

 

So have you had any experiences like this?

I think there was a patch to some game a while ago that was infected by a virus..but I can't recall the details. :(

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Yeah - a pair of them in particular.

 

It is really easy for these two to get on your system, but you try aking the sods back off again!

 

And when they get together - just kiss your machine good bye. Adios.

Tell it to put it's CPU between it's PCI ports and kiss it's ass goodbye.

 

And the name of these malicious pieces of soft-as-****-ware...

 

You guessed it:

 

Micrsoft Windows and AOL!

 

ARRRGGGHHHH - SCUMMY CODE!

 

*looks sheepishly around*

 

err... did you want serious posts...:D

 

*blushes*

 

Well, not had difficulty with anything on THAT scale.

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My friend installed ummm Roxio to use as burning software...

 

Broke his damn CD drive. Flat out. I couldn't fix it, or at least I couldn't figure out *how* to fix it... I just had to reformat his HDD :(

 

It was some extra software that came with it Creative CD or some crap like that... I uninstalled the drive, the drivers and the software... Everything. Still couldn't get the damn thing to work!

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Roxio, now there is a software company that knows how to kill off a PC....

 

Ever tried to uninstall their CD Writing software, it fails to remove all traces of itself from the Registry, which is why it can make CD writers no longer appear in Explorer. I have had it happen, and had to remove the stupid settings to give Nero a chance to see the CD Writer.

 

Another good one is Symantec's Winfax Pro - this is known to kill Win95, and 98 (Not SE I believe). It delves too deep into Windows and seems to totally shaft it if you uninstall it....

Only way we had to fix it at work was to reformat the Hard Drive and start over again if we needed to remove it...

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There was a really, really old flight sim game from when the game company Sierra was just getting on its feet. It was a nifty game, but it had one interesting feature. If you crashed your airplane, you would crash your computer as well. Ken Williams (the programmer/developer) thought it would give added incentive to not crash.

 

It didnt go over well. :p

 

Ad-Aware is pretty evil sometimes. I used it to purge some spyware put there by Kazaa (DIE, BONZI BUDDY!), and it claimed that some incredibly vital file to windows was spyware. I had never seen the file before, so I deleted it. Fwoosh! Away goes my net connection. Time for a reformat! Oof....

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Adware - yeah - thats the culprit!

 

Little swine said it would take all the spyware and stuff off my machine for improved Kazaa usuage (theres another one now I think about it - Kazaa Lite is FAR superior!)

 

It scanned everything, and said - 'Scrub this to clean your machine'.

 

Didn't realise it meant cleaning of every piece of data there was!

 

Luckily I am a God to my computer, and the dear White Witch pulled through with no long term side effects.

 

Near thing though.

 

Must 'review' it on cnet.... ;)

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Yeah, bugs like this crash the system all the time. I just love when you put your system into an infinate loop and it just sits there until all your resources are ate up and crash. Or how about in Assembler with the DOS Interrupt (21h), and if you forget the 'h' (hex) and enter demcial 21 (15h) then you remap memory locations on your drive, hence having to format the drive. :D

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Ad-Aware is bad? What should I use instead?

 

When I did use Ad-Aware to remove the spyware from Kazaa, i deleted some stuff that said it was spyware, but when i tried to run Kazaa, it said it was missing an important file to run. Either it needed the Spyware or AA was wrong. Luckily I backed up the stuff before I deleted it so just restored the files..

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yeah, kazaa required a certain spyware thing in order to run. i cant remember the name of it, but it starts with 'c', and is 5 or 6 letters long, if that helps any... ill try and find out just exactly which file it is, then get back to you later. either way, i use lite, which i find is a little better:D

 

 

EDIT: cydoor, dont delete anything that says cydoor. kazaa needs that to run. well, it doesnt need it, but it is written torequire it.

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