Lesson Learned

I got an email from my ISP the other day saying that one of my computers was being used to do a denial of service attack. Apparently somebody managed to hack into one of my computers and use it to attack someone else's server or whatever. The strange thing about it was that they were using an old virus. Really old. Something that had been dealt with may service packs ago in XP. I'm on Windows 7 x 64 now.

Strange. It kind of made sense. I suspected that my laptop had been hit by a virus I couldn't figure out why my laptop drive was 95% full. So I had to do some serious work just to get my laptop useable again. That was before I got the email from Telus. It took me a good day just to get the hundreds of gigs of gibberish off of that hard drive. It was painful.

So the next logical thing to do was to scan for viruses. I did and found nothing. Shortly after that was when I got the email from Telus. They gave me a whack of links to try and clean my computers from any infection. I scanned both of my computers with every tool they suggested and found nothing. Seriously. Not a single thing.

I figured I was good. I emailed Telus back and told them that the problem had been dealt with. A few days go by and I get another email from Telus telling me that my IP was suspected of doing another denial of service attack! What? So I go through another day of scanning and updating and nothing. I changed all my passwords for everything. I change the settings on my router and hope that that settles it. Maybe someone was using my wirless to do the DOS attack.

I walk into my bedroom and look over at my old laptop. Man I had to get rid of that thing. I set it up to see if I could find a way to make it useful. At the least for the kids to surf on. I tried Damn Small Linux, Lubuntu, Windows 2000 and finally settled back with Windows XP.  I took the thing into the living room and opened it up. Lo and behold it was running. I had no idea. That thing had been on probably a good month  or so. I didn't even realize it. No wonder neither my desktop nor my new laptop scanned positive for viruses. They were clean! And, the issue with my new laptop? It seems my old laptop was being used to attack my new laptop. HUH? That's just weird. I used DBan to flatten the hard drive and finally pitched that thing into the recycle depot.