Er, is this bad?

[brooksmoses]

My laptop crashed on bootup recently. (It does this; I sent it back for warranty repairs, and it returned with a few things checked off on the list of possible things to be repaired, and also "MYLAR" was written into the "Other" slot and checked. Weird.)

The error message that it provided was, essentially, a "can't find the requested proceedure" error. For something called "ntTarminatEProceSs".

Yes, spelled and capitalized like that. Not "ntTerminateProcess", which is all I could find on the web. Any idea what was up with that?

Comments

Re: Er, is this bad?

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

virus? i mean, with that spelling, this is what comes to mind immediately.

[elisteran.livejournal.com]

Yep, virus, trojan, or other nefarious attacks. Nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.

[fourgates.livejournal.com]

Slightly different spellings are one method of having a program escape human detection if someone were to do a Ctrl+Alt+Del and look at the process list, sniffing for Unfamiliar Bad Things. (ntTerminateProcess might well be a worker process that kills other processes, which would be invoked at that time when the user is trying to kill a suspected trojan.)