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> On at least one occasion I was able to detect malware on my machine by noticing unexpected background network traffic via the light on my network hub blinking
by southerntofu 5y ago
> On at least one occasion I was able to detect malware on my machine by noticing unexpected background network traffic via the light on my network hub blinking when it shouldn't have been.
That's golden. Would deserve a blogpost on its own.
- com2kid 5y agoBack then it was pretty easy. If you weren't actively loading a webpage or playing a game, there wouldn't be any network traffic. This was back before the days of auto updates or telemetry! So basically if I was doing something locally, and I saw the lights blink on my hub, and my (tiny!) process list didn't have any obvious suspects, I knew something was up. Malware wasn't nearly as well hidden back then, so uncovering it wasn't all that hard.
- southerntofu 5y agoI fondly remember that period indeed. But reading your comment i realized it's been a while since i could tell whether my computer having network activity was suspicious or not, and i'm guessing a lot of younger people don't even realize that could be a thing. > Malware wasn't nearly as well hidden back then, so uncovering it wasn't all that hard. Yeah catpicture.jpg.exe was definitely easier to identify than modern viruses are.