Mark Russinovich of Sysinternals fame is promoting his new book with “The Case of the Malicious Autostart”

This one starts when Microsoft support got a call from a customer representing a large US hospital network reporting that they had been hit with an infestation of the Marioforever virus. They discovered the virus when their printers started getting barraged with giant print jobs of garbage text, causing their network to slow and the printers to run out of paper. Their antivirus software identified a file named Marioforever.exe in the %SystemRoot% folder of one of the machines spewing files to the printers as suspicious, but deleting the file just resulted in it reappearing at the subsequent reboot. Other antivirus programs failed to flag the file at all.

Will the engineer assigned to the case find the smoking DLL?

Will Microsoft be able to catch and stop the malware before nuclear missiles are launched?

He could have spiced it up a bit with some character development (instead of just “The engineer”) but if you’re interested in a stream of facts it’s a great read.

And if you like this, you’ll love the Compound Case of the Outlook Hangs.