The Witchfinder received a taunting email via an anonymous email provider with a Point of Presence in Bulgaria on Tuesday. The email (in rhyme) appears to claim they did penetrate my laptop over easter weekend and used it for nefarious purposes. This may or may not be true – they might be taunting me based on my previous tweeted comments. However, having purged said laptop and restored to an earlier backup reveals no current security issues.
The internet is a fun place …
If something like this happens again don’t flatten and reinstall your machine. Give it to someone to investigate, or at least image your HDD before reinstalling so someone could have a look in the future. Imagine if this really was by your opponents? This could have been a smoking gun but you destroyed the evidence.
Personally I doubt it was anything. What you described would have to have been a drive by install which realistically could only have happened by a seriously out of date browser, seriously out of date mail client, or plugin (i.e. something like Java, go to about:plugins in Chrome or Firefox and disable anything you don’t use). If you were using something like the Gmail web interface in Chrome then I doubt you were ever infected.
What you described sounded like an old fashioned trojan or what is now called a RAT. In Windows Vista, 7, or 8 it would have flagged up all kind of UAC, WIndows Firewall, and MSE/Defender warnings (don’t be one of those dummies who doesn’t understand UAC but disables it, turn it up to full and read the “show details” when unexpected things ask for permission).
So unless you’re a total retard I doubt anything like that got on your machine. Having a virus scanner pick up stuff in your temporary internet files doesn’t mean anything was actually installed. Virus scanners have a lot of heuristic analysis false positives.
Saying all that I did one time literally have someone take over my machine and type a scary full screen message telling me to back off, so anything is possible. It was something straight out of the movies but security was so different in the 90s (I was a bit of a script kiddie) and nothing like that could happen today as long as you have some common sense.
If you believe it was real, then you need to completely format your hard drive and reinstall from a DVD or whatever. Anything less is not a panacea. Official Vista and 7 ISOs are available for free from Amazon (through Digital River) and all you need is a serial key which should be on a sticker on your laptop. Official Windows 8 ISOs are more difficult to find.