In mid November of 2025, a web property I manage had the distinction of being compromised. Locking this site down had been difficult because of how many had permission over the installation. Too many things change, too often. None of these things I could control, but when it broke, they came to me for the fix. In I.T., this is usually not a position we want to be in, but sometimes I relish this kind of challenge.
Phishing is the most common way bad guys steal your passwords and hook viruses into your machine. This is routinely done via email, but this practice is becoming more popular in SMS messages in a practice Forbes has called Smishing. Today, I received one such message and thought I’d go deeper and get to the heart of this malicious phenomenon.
The pitch, as Karl Palachuk puts it, is that Windows users who are not locally administrative users cannot be infected with viruses. This is an absurd and wrong line of thinking from someone who professes to have been in the IT industry for more than 25 years. But, we can all be wrong, so I say own it Karl.
The most important line users cross with any software is the point of running (or installation). This is usually where you have a need to fulfill (like play video), and a software title in mind (like VLC Media Player). But, since you’re a cautious user who doesn’t assume a virus scanner is perfect, and you don’t […]
The anti-virus (AV) application is dead, right? This often bloated, resource-intensive application has to scan every single file on a computer; but still misses that one malicious application that brings your network to its knees.
This is what seems like a tipping point, as many have started to seriously question the effectiveness of locally installed Virus Scanning applications. This idea of depending on virus scanning applications has been on my mind, and I wanted to flesh it out.
It struck me how obvious this was when I heard a customer mention the name of the virus: “Smart Fortress 2012”. I thought, this is another one of those fake malware applications that I’ve seen time and time again. Since this user’s computer was infected while running an up-to-date version of a virus scanner, it proves the […]
When I made the Process Killer utility, all I intended it for was to include it with an installer to stop processes before the process started. This worked well, so prockill lived on. As I would work in the field, I would come across computers infected with viruses that would restrict execution of utilities like the great Process Explorer or PsKill […]
This little gem was written in January of 2003 on my web page (when it was on the domain calwell.ca). The article was more of a response to the large number of infections I had to clean from customer’s PCs. These things were a big problem then, because many of the Anti-Virus programs of the time did […]