I took a nap around 3:30 PM. Sometime in there I dreamt I visited a seemingly harmless web site on a client's machine, but then found that the site was infected with some virus or something (the file listing included such evil things as "autorun.inf" and "autorun.exe") and realized too late that I infected my client's machine!

Aaaaaaahhhhh!

I remember trying to stop it from running and having processes launching left and right with seemingly impenetrable filenames... the Task Manager was then disabled! And finally I pulled the plug to restart it and it crashed with INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE.

Noooooooooooo......

At one point I was trying to install something, with the client hovering over my shoulder, and I found myself struggling to type in a product key. Ever have a nightmare where you're trying to run away but you're moving at a snail's pace? This was what was happening to me in front of a keyboard... can't... type... product... key...

The really frightening thing was most of this was modelled after a presentation I watched on Wedensday, which featured a nasty piece of spyware that did just that - threw up a bunch of windows, disabled the Task Manager, and disabled the system so it wouldn't restart.

I don't know how other IT people can sleep after being shown presentations like this... I think that will be the last security conference I go to for quite some time.

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