My daughter turned sixteen on Saturday. What a wonderful treat! I am so proud of her. This was a weekend of high school football, teenage girls giggling, Rocket and swimming. The weather was incredibly cooperative. This morning, she takes her drivers license test! My little girl has grown up.

There was also a dark side to the weekend. A neighbor, one of my wife's best friends, had her computer infected with several pieces of malware, a trojan horse and a rootkit. The problem that caused all of this was one of education. The machine was properly equipped with virus protection. Her teenagers allowed these programs to be installed through some highly effective social engineering. First, there was a worm downloaded from Facebook. Then, the virus scanner caught a different trojan from another download, but one of the kids OK'ed the install, overriding the virus protection. These good kids, trusting in nature had been hoodwinked by the social engineering hacker denizens of the internet. The worst thing is, once these programs had been installed, they were effectively hidden from the virus scanner and Lavasoft's Ad-aware.

I basically blame three sources: the criminal minds of the hackers, the trusting nature of the teenagers, and Microsoft, which ought to be able to design a secure operating system. Fortunately, I was able to find Anti-Malware. This program was able to effectively find the installed rootkit/trojan and remove them. After the trojan and root kit were removed, I was able to use the anti-virus program and Ad-aware to clean up the rest of the system. It took a lot of research, which was hampered by needing to use a different machine to search google and download fixes. Once removed, I was able to change the kids' accounts to Limited (User) from Administrator. It's how I run the computers at my house. My kids complain because they have to use Run-As to install a program, but it also keeps the computers running reasonably well. I'm just thankful to the Anti-Malware folks.

All's well that ends well.

Gene

P.S. I'll have a lot to talk about this week, in the land of the United Socialist States of America, what with the takeover of Freddie and Fannie so the investment banks can make even more money at tax payer expense. Every day will be another day in Sweden for U.S. citizens. Sure, our finances will look a little more secure (at least for a couple of years), but we'll have surrendered even more of our freedoms at the expense of the investment banks. And 42,000 lobbyists will be assured that their influence will increase as the days go by.