Damn

There are so many titles I could put on this post, and until I actually save it, I probably won’t know which one I will use. Long story short, my PC has gone belly up, or as we used to say in the USAF, “Tango Uniform”, which is the phonetic alphabet for T U. I’ll let you figure out what the T U means.

Twenty or so years ago, I fancied myself a hacker. Nothing malicious, just some occasional fun of getting into a site I wasn’t supposed to be in. Life online was good; computer security was lax if it was used at all. However, it did not take long until things really took off and left me in the lurch. Now I’m nothing like a hacker. They are light years ahead of me. I am just a user and sometimes a very poor one at that.

The other night I was on a site I shouldn’t have been on. One of those sites that fit in the grey area between the safe, every day sites and the ones who like to stay well below the radar. I hadn’t been to one of these sites in a few years, primarily because a lot of them used to be supported by porn sites and sometimes you’d get a screen flood of pictures of bare naked ladies and it’s hard to convince the missus that you were not looking at them intentionally. I wasn’t of course, and would close the windows as quickly as I could, but she always remained a bit skeptical.

Anyway, I hadn’t been on this site more than a minute when BOOM! It was almost like a home invasion. Windows started popping up advertising a specific malware cleaner and giving me the option of evaluating it or buying it. I should have closed down immediately, but I had Symantic in place and it had always stopped such things before. This time however, whatever it was came right through Symantic and by the time it caught up with what was going on this thing had a firm hold on my PC. All of my scanners and cleaners were disabled as this thing attacked them first.

I quickly unplugged the internet cable but it was too late. It would not let me use the scanners I already had nor could I load any new ones. I tried to restore my machine from the Windows restore application, but that didn’t work either. I was finally able to get in through Safe Mode to a point I could load a cleaner and it found something like 63 pieces of spyware, viruses or Trojans. It cleaned them off but the system was still limping, so I started the scrubbing process. I thought I was making good headway until last night, when two more viruses got on, apparently through a back door the first group left open, and Symantec tried to clean them but finally just threw up its hands as if to say, “I give up!”

So now my only recourse is to wipe the drive clean, reformat it and install one of my backups, which are several months old since I’ve been lazy lately. I will lose the emails, address books, pictures, personal files, web site work, etc. that we all harbor on our PCs and while I can get a lot of it back, some will be gone forever. It’s kind of like losing your wallet. You get past the money part of what’s missing fairly quickly; it’s the other personal things that bother you the most.

What does all this have to do with you guys? Hopefully nothing, but my ISP did inform me that they had gotten complaints that I was a spam zombie. Apparently, one of the infections was using my machine to send spam to the internet. If any of you got flooded with spam because of me, I’m sorry. More than that though, if you haven’t backed up your system lately, do it soon. External hard drives are getting cheaper and cheaper every day. Keep your system clean, set your machine to clean it routinely, and get a good firewall/virus protection package and use it. Set it up to scan everything as it comes into your machine.

You could save yourself a lot of headaches, not to mention money.