Technofobe

During some of my linux research I stumbled across this great site listing a ton of live CDs that are available. I never knew that so many existed.

For those of you who are wondering what a "live cd" is... It is a CD that you can use to boot a computer and run the operating system completely from the CD. No hard drive needed.

The security folks at Microsoft have come to this conclusion as well. In a security presentation at the Infosec World conference Mike Danseglio, program manager in the Security Solutions group at Microsoft stated the following:

"When you are dealing with rootkits and some advanced spyware programs, the only solution is to rebuild from scratch. In some cases, there really is no way to recover without nuking the systems from orbit."

This is in acknowldement to the fact that some infections are self healing and can essentially re-infect a system even when all visible traces are removed. The truth of the matter here is that this malware is so good at hiding in all the nooks and crannies that it is practically impossible to remove the bad software without a complete reload.

To make matters worse some malware is written so that it doesn't produce any performance impact to the system and there are no visible signs of infection. These malware writers have figured out that there is money to be made by stealing peoples information and in creating botnets and they don't want the end user to know that their machines are infected. If the user knows that there is an annoying infection he/she might do something to remove the software or reload the OS and effectively clean the infections.

Ultimately, the only realy way to be reasonably confident that your machine is clean is to reload from scratch and operate as a restricted user for day to day computing.

Yep, Microsoft has decided to begin giving away their Virtual Server software for free. And... GASP! ... they will support Linux. Here is an information article. And here is the relevant Microsoft link for downloads and other info.

Just last night I successfully got Ubuntu up and running as a virtual maching under Microsoft's Virtual server. Now I just need to build a beefy server so I can fiddle with a bunch of different client and server OS's at once.

Cool stuff.

The other day I was cruising around the internet and decided I wanted to try out a couple of live linux CDs and I didn't have my laptop handy with my copy of Roxio.

Normally when you download these CD images you receive these in in a single file with an .iso extension. Unfortunately, with the stock Windos XP functionality you can not burn image files to CD. You can burn normal files without any special software but ISO files are apparently a different matter.

I didn't really want to pay for a full burning package like Nero or Roxio so I jumped on Google and started to poke around a bit. In no time I had my answer:

ISO Recorder

This is free software developed by a fellow names Alex Feinman. It is very simple to install and use. You can essentially burn the image to a CD in about 2 clicks of a mouse. In a nutshell, you just have to right-click on the CD image (after installing the software) and choose Copy image to CD and then click OK. It's really that simple. Here is the detailed How-To with screen shots.

Apparently, you can also create ISO image files from a CD although I have not tested this yet.

This is great stuff. It's free, easy to install, and it works. I've already burned 3 images and haven't made any coaster yet.

Thanks for the great utility Alex!

Additional note: Here is an informative web site with information on buring CD images using several different utilities including Roxio and Nero.