Recently Andy Warren Blogged about things that could drive your DBA mad.  There was a lot of feedback on SQLServerCentral about various things that could be done to drive the DBA nuts.  Well, I have one that could drive a DBA mad (this one in particular) and any IT professional for that matter.

What drives me Mad is not the things done in ignorance, so much.  It is the malicious things that drive me batty.  Malicious acts or attacks against a Database, or computer, are downright dirty.  They take a substantial amount of resources, time and energy to correct.

Why did I pick this one?

I think that any who is the Computer geek of the family (or who has friends) can empathize on this one.  Recently I was enlisted to assist with a family computer.  The computer was borrowed and returned with nasty malware and a virus.  It was a tricky virus in that it disabled virus scanners and disabled the layers of spyware removal apps I had previously installed.  Several hours later and still working on removing the nasty bugger.  It is somewhat difficult to do this from across the internet – thus I will be making a trek to the computer to pay a repair visit.

Personally, I have only gotten a virus twice on a personal machine.  Both times it really ticked me off.  The first time was when I connected via VPN to the work network.  The network was infected already and downloaded the virus to my machine.  That was easily eradicated.  The second time was when I connected a media player to my laptop.  The player had a proprietary format and thus I was converting the files from owned media to be usable on the media player.  This was my nephew’s media player and I have no idea where else he had plugged it in.  As soon as I plugged it into my laptop, the virus was uploaded.  I figured the media player was causing the quirky behavior but decided to run a virus scan anyway.  That was annoying.  Of all places to get a virus – from a media player.

There are people out there that get a kick out of writing these kinds of apps.  It takes a certain level of talent to do it – but I don’t much like the way it is being used.  This is the type of stuff that drives a DBA mad.