Virus "pwnd" me twice today

[ronzo]

Yep, a .com file extension. Tricky bastards....

Social engineering at its finest

[cgkades]

My workaround was to switch to Linux Of all the bad things I say about Microsoft Windows though, I've gotta give it one thing: it gives a fantastic "out of the box" experience. Stuff just works straight away. I installed Linux a few months ago and I'm still trying to get it right (my DVD drive is still slow as shit). It's a shame how the whole "out of the box" experience can have such an impact on a person's opinion about an operating system. When I first tried Ubuntu maybe about a year ago, I quickly got sick of it; too much stuff needed tweaking (e.g. the font rendering was disgusting). I tried switching from MSWindows to Ubuntu more than once, but fell back to MSWindows each time.

A few months ago, I really made the effort to switch to Linux, and now I'm using Ubuntu-with-Xfce as my main OS. I never boot into WinXP anymore (except for checking viruses ).

I still haven't got my Linux setup quite right, but once I've got it figured out I'm 100% certain it will be superior to MSWindows. If I had a Linux guru living next door to me he'd probably have my laptop sorted in fifteen minutes...

I should really make a to-do list of stuff I want to change on my Linux system, first thing I need to do is get my DVD drive working at more than 4 megabytes a second

ubuntu FTW! i like gnome desktop though. I'm going to get a netbook with ubuntu on it, and use that as my pentest laptop at work

[imported_aliosity]

I don't get why you clicked the -folder-looking-file- on your laptop, surely if you had unchecked "hide extensions of known filetypes" "and hide protected operating system files" you would have seen the .com extension and not mistaken it for a folder?

Also in my experience you cannot assign an icon to a .com file, only to exe and the likes...

Good story though

[Virchanza]

I don't get why you clicked the -folder-looking-file- on your laptop, surely if you had unchecked "hide extensions of known filetypes" "and hide protected operating system files" you would have seen the .com extension and not mistaken it for a folder?

It was a ".exe", not a ".com" file. It had the regular MS Windows folder icon. Psychologically, I'm influenced more by pictures than text, so my first reaction was to believe the picture, so I took it to be a folder that had a ".exe" name. I was curious about what was being hidden inside that folder, so I double-clicked it to take a look inside.

As Streaker69 said, it's best to do this stuff at the commandline.