Thread-resurrection of Doom!!!
We need to achieve more.
My achievements:
1) after three days (that was my weekend...), I have worked through a highly complicated 23 page scientific paper, adding a figure and text, a paper which just might become a quite fundamental piece of science in my field. (No, no, I'm far from being first author - #5 of 12)
2) I think I actually managed to repair my computer!! Since December, it had started acting up. Between a few minutes and a few hours after starting, the SVCHOST process crashed. This led to some weird effects. Programs that were still open (Mail, Browser, etc.) still ran on, but it was not possible to open new programs, any interaction with the Windows Explorer turned off, and finally, the computer didn't shut down any more... This became extremely annoying. Seeing that my Windows system was already five (!!!) years old, I bought a new hard drive and completely reinstalled everything, which was a real bitch.
And the problem... persisted.
This lead me to think it might be a memory problem, we played around in the computer's innards... Nothing helped, though I had not yet checked out new RAM modules.
Yesterday, I noticed something. The error report from SVCHOST was something like "SVCHOST tried to access adress "gobbledigook", adress "gobbledigook" could not be read." The "gobbledigook" had been identical in both crashes. So I googled the adress - and got hits. From something named metasploit. Which seems to be an open source, "ethical hacker" site where people try to find security holes in software. While I did not understand exactly what was going on, "my" adress showed up in some kind of program code as an adress specific to my Windows system and language... I then googled metasploit itself, and a few hits down, stumbled upon a McAfee press release which reported that the by now infamous Conficker worm was using an exploit published on metasploit - exactly the exploit everyone has been twittering about these last weeks! I followed linkage to the MS patch, installed that, also downloaded the MS malware removal tool (of course, I have anti-virus), let it run - and then left for the concert.
Today, coming back, no crashed SVCHOST!!! The malware thingy found... nothing!! But I had read that Conficker does not spread in classical ways, but infects... networks. Like the one here at work. So now my hunch is that some Windows computer on this network (which is, of course, kept under less tight regulations concerning my firewall) is infected, and somehow tried to RPC-access my computer, which lead to a crash of the SVCHOST...
Guess I should inform our sysadmins one day.
Anyhoo, it's 4:25 in the morning, I gotta get home.
And sleep the sleep of the achievers. ;)
