So i been in the it field for a few years now and i've noticed that the number of virus/malware infections i get have increased ten fold in the last couple months. I probably have to kill 5 - 10 a week and these aren't the oh i'll just slap avg on there and roll type these are heavy registry editing, work in command prompt, combofix, etc types that are extremley hard to kill. Is there somthing going in the IT industry? Lapse of security? Crappy programming? I've noticed the infections have been especially bad on windows XP. I've seen several crippling viruses. One of the most recent ones I had to kill which in the end crippled the OS was the 'virut' virus. Seriously the most insideous virus i have ever seen. It' litterly infects every single executeable file within the OS so there is no way to get it out unless you boot from and external source.

Anyways I was just curious what the rest of the IT crowd here thought especially guy slike gunfighter who have been in the industry awhile. Peace.

Well,

A lot of the things you are describing would require some participation from a user with admin rights on the machine.

In other words, clicking links in emails, opening attachments, putting in a thumb drive that is infected, etc.

XP is not terribly secure but you should not be having these issues. What flavor of AV are you running? MS actually has their own free anti-virus software which is called "MS Security Essentials".

If things are bad enough then you can consider reloading from scratch, zeroing out the hard disk and installing the antivirus from download image before you ever connect the machine to the internet.

Is there another less secure machine in the home that has common file access to the one with all of the problems?

If you have multiple computers in the home you might want to consider the step of going to centrally managed anti-virus and if you visit a lot of not-so-safe websites then you might want to beef up your router/firewall substantially, there are models that actually will do packet level protection against malicious attacks such as a Sonicwall TZ100. These start at around $180 plus a subscription for the protection.

Consider upgrading to Windows 7 as it is tremendously more secure than XP and will at least try to stop the user from running malicious code through the UAC.

Or, you can do what I did and replace the heavy use PCs in the house with Macs (or Linux for that matter).

My wife and I both have Macs and I haven't had to do a single damn thing to fix either of them in a year. Additionally I just run XP under VMWare on my iMac for when I want a PC gaming fix (which is getting less and less common these days as I use my consoles for most gaming).

Good luck!

Now that you've had a real response, here's one from the less talented.

I have a new theory and action plan for bad infections. Remember the movie Heat with Robert Deniro and Al Pacino? I embrace the part where Deniro said something like, "If the heat comes down, I have nothing I can't walk away from in two seconds."

"Hey viruses, look what I got for you." *waves XP disc menacingly*

Fortunately I can do that, as my PC is for entertainment. Anything business related becomes a hard copy.

The problem is, there is no seperation between work and play on the web. If I really needed PC power for business, I would have a laptop soley for work. No emails, no direct file DL's, no internet connection on my work
computer.

^^

Restrict like a mofo!

I have taken the same stance as Wrecks. I just assume I wll get infected sooner or later, so I make sure I have relaible backups of everything, and REINSTALL!!!

W7 seems to make reinstalling alot easier too, though I havn't had to...yet.

I've found I can clean most viruses... even the nasty ones. The only virus that actually kicked my ass was the "virut" virus. That virus trashed the OS completly. Other then that I've found several pieces of 3rd party malware/rootkit removal software that works wonders. The point of my post I guess wasn't so much for advice as it was to see if someone had seen somthing or heard somthing. It just seems like the numbers of infections that I have been seeing have increased 10 fold.

I caught a rootkit virus once and cleaned it with a handy little program called Regrun Reanimator. Highly recommended because it's free and it works. The last time I caught a virus though it was a doozy. Locked me out of administrator rights and threw a bunch of porno shortcut cuts on to my desktop. It blocked my virus scanner too. That one required a re-install, which lead to me buying Windows 7 so actually I was kind of happy about the whole thing because I'd been humming and hawing about upgrading my OS anyway.

I actually have several tools that I use. What most people don't realize is that most standard virus scanners, like avg, avast, ccleaner, norton, macafee all get disabled by alot of the newer viruses.

I tend to use 1 to 3 of the following tools in my infection removals.
1. Combofix... hands down one of the best rootkit removers out there. It works so well because it is a rootkit. If you have a system that is unresponsive this will get it responsive. It will even check and replace windows system files that are infected.
2. Malwarebytes-This program is free for use and catches near damn everything.
3. Superantispyware-Similar to malwarebytes in scope but catches some thigns that it doesn't.

I can kil 98% of viruses out there using these tools. If i need to I can run an offline scan on the drive and get the viruses off that way but I've found that I can get around most viruses if i boot to safe mode or safemode with command prompt.