News Items
Oct 04, 2005 06:02PM
I'm in the midst of transitioning my site from PHP to Python for the back end scripting. There was nothing wrong with the PHP code, in fact I was quite happy with it. However, I'm trying to teach myself Python in addition to web programming, and I was looking for a Python based solution. I figured my personal site with its small size was a good testing bed. From an outside perspective you should notice almost no difference in the site. If you see anything that seems out of whack or awry, please do let me know through the newly revamped contact form.
Speaking of the contact form, I find it somewhat sad that HUGE text saying "don't send me email without a HijackThis log" had almost no effect on the number of emails I received with no useful information. Yet, when I add in logic to the contact form to prevent submission unless you include log information, tadaaaaa....emails suddenly come in with useful information. I suppose I'd be an idiot if I actually expected people to read the contact form without being forced to.
-Jay
Sep 26, 2005 10:58PM
Please note that I am out of town tomorrow and will very likely be unable to do any updates to AIMFix or answer any email until Wednesday (September 28). If you need help, please follow the instructions on the contact page to send me a HijackThis log and I will do my best to go over everything when I get back.
-Jay
Sep 26, 2005 09:43AM
Just when I start getting really tired and run down, something comes along that restores some of my faith in humanity :)
As you may have read, a few days ago I spent the night analyzing pokapoka, and realized it's just a bit beyond what I'm able to remove, and it would take extra effort and new code to remove, and that I'd work on a removal tool for it. Well, something much cooler came along. SimplyTech has gone and created an EiliteBar removal tool (this will also remove pokapoka, which is part of the EilteBar malware.
Kudos to the guys at SimplyIT for coming up with this tool and releasing it as free software. I only wish there were more people out there doing this kind of thing. I know all of us in the malware removal game surely appreciate it, and I'm sure the thousands/millions of afflicted computer users out there appreciate it too!
-Jay
Sep 25, 2005 01:41PM
I don't know what the deal is, but there have been like fifty new virus variants in the past two days. I'm getting a little fed up with updating AIMFix pretty much continuously! Anyway, in addition to that, AIMFix apparently won't run on 98 or ME right now. I just now figured out why, but finding out a way around it is going to be a real pain in the rear. Anywho, I'll work on that when I can and hopefully I'll have something out there soon. For the time being, I'll put up a special AIMFix version for 98/ME users.
You can download AIMFix for Windows 98 or ME here: http://jayloden.com/AIMFix_98.exe
-Jay
Sep 22, 2005 11:15PM
Ok, I lied. I was going to go to bed or do something constructive, but I gave up and decided to code the quarantine function tonight. From now on, instead of deleting a file, AIMFix will create a directory on your Desktop called "aimfix_quarantine" where it will place all suspected virus files (instead of deleting them outright). It will also change the name of the file so that instead of "virus.exe" it will look like "quarantined_virus.exe.bak" to prevent anyone from accidentally running a quarantined virus by mistake. However, should AIMFix incorrectly detect a file as a virus, you can easily recover it from the quarantine.
All current versions of AIMFix should now have quarantine functionality. If the quarantine folder cannot be created for any reason, AIMFix will fall back on it's old method of simply deleting files. In the future, I'd like to add support for zipping the quarantine directory to keep viruses from being run inside it, but that'll have to wait for another day. I also plan on adding support for specifying a quarantine folder on the command line, since I'm sure someone will ask for this feature sooner or later :)
Between the new quarantine feature and some of the code changes, I'm bumping the version number up to 1.3.x as well.
Thanks to Tom, one of my users who pointed out the unsafe nature of deleting detected files. Thanks to his feedback, AIMFix gets a new feature, and hopefully it will help prevent any mishaps in the future with cases of mistaken identity.
-Jay
