Alright. So today I noticed that the laptop I use for robotics (as well as personal stuff) was running really sluggishly. I hadn't really used it since the Hofstra regional so this was the first I noticed. Then I started getting random windows exception messages about something called ringer.exe. A quick google suggested it's a piece of malware. I then realized that I didn't have any antivirus on that machine, probably an oversight from when I last reinstalled windows. Anyway I immediately installed AVG and set it on a full scan of C. So far it's found two things,
Code:
C:\d.exe - Trojan horse Downloader.Generic9.BLZP
C:\Program Files\National Instruments\RT Images\Utilities\BIOS Updater\10.3\7063\flashUpdate.exe - Trojan horse Generic12.BRCM
Obviously, the second entry really set off alarm bells. I hadn't installed LabView until a day during Hofstra, when we needed to quickly switch to something other than Java. That was the first robotics software I had installed on that OS, in fact, as I did all my Java development in Mac OS X. Is it possible that one of the updates or maybe even the National Instruments disk was tainted? I don't know how else it would get flagged like that.
EDIT:
I just did a google for flashUpdate.exe, something I probably should have done before. NI seems to say it's a false positive, but I can swear that I wasn't having any performance issues before the regional. Also I'm not really sure where I'd get malware. I very rarely download things to that computer and all my games come from Steam...