A few days ago was I trying to find a crack for MySQL-Front. Yeah, I know I should of course buy it instead of cracking it, but it’s so full of bugs that demanding money for it is just plain rude. I’ll buy it when the bugs are gone. Anyway, I was able to find a crack, but instead of saving it, I told Opera to automatically open it when it was finished downloading.

Dumb, dumb, dumb.

What I was downloading was not a crack of MySQL-Front in a ZIP file like I thought, but a small executable. Cracks usually come in ZIP files and I really didn’t notice the EXE-extension before it was too late. My first thought was “Trojan”, so I checked for strange memory footprints and processes without actually finding anything. I also ran my antivirus software and monitored network traffic for a while without noticing anything suspicious.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Yesterday evening my laptop turned into a SPAM zombie, sending unsolicited e-mail to @yahoo.com from my office support mail. Not just a few e-mails, rather five to ten a second. It looks like the little fucker I executed by mistake has silently downloaded all kinds of junk to my computer, everything from spam engines to IRC bots. I didn’t find any key loggers, but it doesn’t really matter as I don’t remember having accessed any important password protected sites or documents the last couple of days.

I think I’ve been able to remove everything now. But I’m tempted to re-install XP.

This is just embarrassing. I wonder if my Dell can run Linux or BSD.