Chewin in the Chung

Via Fark:

Unprotected PCs fall to hacker bots in just four minutes

From the resulting Windows/OSX/Linux flamewar that erupted in response to the above:

Windows is like a hippy on acid running through a rice paddy during the Vietnam War. Carefree, happy, and having fun, but inevitably going to step on a mine and blow himself to hell.

Linux is like the guy in Montana sealed in a bunker waiting for the apocalypse. Paranoid, without many options or much to do, but he's going to be around for a long time.

Heh.
In a related event, I was talking to Terry last night about the problems he has with his XP-Pro loaded laptop. It crashes often in a blaze of blue-screened, memory-dumping glory, and he was telling me the things he has done to try and fix it. One thing he did was to install Panda Antivirus software. He said that it found viruses that his (updated) Norton Antivirus had missed. So he uninstalled Norton everything and just runs Panda now. This helped his crash situation somewhat, but didn't fix it entirely.

But the Panda thing got me thinking. So this morning I went to their site and did the Activescan, their free online scanner.

Six files infected. The incidents were:
TRJ/Downloader.BJ
Expolit:ByteVerify (four instances of this found)
TRJ/ComSys.A

I'm running Norton Internet Security 2004, fully updated. Installed on top of 2003 version last July.

Hmm. Assuming that the results of the Panda scan are legit, I might shell out the $24.99 or whatever and buy the added protection. I certainly cannot abide the thought of hackers or crackers or virus-bots accessing my computer's folder of Barry Manilow mp3's.