Hard Drive keeps filling up

From: Harris Samuel W PORT (HarrisSW_at_mail.ports.navy.mil)
Date: 09/22/03

  • Next message: Brian Rosario: "RE: Niche Security Market" 
    To: security-basics@securityfocus.com
Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2003 14:08:40 -0400

            I have been having a problem for a week now and can't seem to detect
    the culprit. This is on my home network. On my wife's machine, the OS is
    Windows XP, 2.8G, Broadband connected, with 802.11g Linksys wireless router.
    I have 3 firewalls running on it, zonelabs, tiny and the firewall included
    with XP. I have an online subscription to McAfee virus software, and it is
    kept up to date as new updates are issued. I have checked Task Manager and
    shut down the processes that I knew wouldn't cause me a problem, the rest
    seem innocent enough, (to my knowledge). I've done netstat several times
    and haven't discovered any obvious unknown connections. I have even locked
    the firewall down (Zonelabs) on several occasions, to eliminate the possibly
    that it was being accessed by an unknown process or program. I have Ad-Aware
    and Spy-Bot on the computer. I have all the updates to XP installed. I
    have used the Shavlik software and have updated everything it comes up
    with, I have used the Microsoft Security Analyzer to check for any security
    problems and have installed all that was called for.
            Now for the problem. 2 weeks ago my daughter called me up and was
    frantic, because she had been instant messaging and some putz came on and
    told her to invite him in or she would be sorry. She didn't and she was. He
    infected her with some worm that proceeded to fill up her hard drive. I had
    given her an old computer that I had and it only had a 12G hard drive. I
    used VNC to check her computer out and tried to stop the bleeding, but it
    was too much for me. Well, a few days later I get a message that my computer
    is almost out of space. I have an 80G hard drive. I looked at the file
    system but couldn't find the files that were big enough to fill it up like
    that. I was performing a scan with McAfee (which detected nothing by the
    way) and noticed that the computer was spending an inordinate amount of time
    on a .tmp file. I looked at the folder that was in question, and bingo I
    found all the used space. There were several files in the folder that all
    ended in .tmp. One I remember was McV90.tmp. There were others, but that is
    the one I remember. It was 48G all by itself. I tried to open it to view it,
    but couldn't find a program that I had that could open it up. I deleted the
    file and regained my space back. A couple of days later the space was being
    eaten up again. I deleted it again and began monitoring it every few hours
    to see if there was any more action. I couldn't detect much for a few hours,
    then it started up again.
            I shut the firewall, so if it was external to the computer, then I
    would stop any outgoing action. The firewall came up with a few complaints,
    but nothing out of the ordinary (I think it wasn't out of the ordinary) This
    didn't seem to stop the process, so I am assuming the problem is in the
    computer. I have a Windows 2000, Redhat, 9.0, Redhat 8.0 on the rest of my
    network. No problems with any of them. I have googled, I have McAfee'd, I
    have done a few other search engines, but I come up empty as to what this
    is. Spybot and Ad-Aware found nothing, as I run them daily. Any ideas where
    to go next? I am fresh out of ideas at the moment
            
    Sam

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  • Next message: Brian Rosario: "RE: Niche Security Market"

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