Some time during the night of Monday the 3rd my machine was hacked and my e-mail hijacked. I was lucky that only my addresses/contacts were deleted.
So, for the past three days I have been in a somewhat 'Stewie-esque' mood. For those of you who know me, and might have picked up in other posts, I'm a big Stewie Griffin fan. I think the following pictures help illustrate the mood of the past few days.
Wednesday morning started out like normal until I checked my mail…
My PC was acting up and I was getting all kinds of e-mail from ticked of people and groups.A huge portion of Wednesday was spent cleaning up the spam mess that MY name was attached to and working with Yahoo to deal with the perp and fix the problem.
Per the people at Yahoo I picked up a worm virus, from another e-mail and that it had infected my system.
The afternoon and early evening was spent trying to hunt down the bug that had invaded my system.Nothing I did seemed to work....
BLAST!!
DAMN YOU VILE MACHINE!!
It was time to seek outside help.
I got on-line and talked to a few people and they hooked me with some helpful web site.It was suggested that I check out the "Kim Komando" site and got to her ''Security Douwnload' page. I have been to her page before and paid it a visit.
However, the main piece of info led me to the CastleCopsWiki site and their 'Malware Removal and Prevention' page.
After following the instructions on the MR&P page I then surfed over to their 'Prevent Re-infection' instructions to figure out how to keep the nasties away.
It was also suggested that I cruise over to the McAfee SiteAdvisor site to get their Internet protection plug-in.
Here is what they claim to do:
McAfee SiteAdvisor™ is a security add-on for your Internet Explorer browser that helps you identify sites that are linked to spyware, adware, spam, viruses, browser-based attacks, phishing, or online fraud.
The McAfee SiteAdvisor service is based on a huge database with detailed test results for more than 100,000 pieces of software and covers more than 95% of the world's Web traffic.
The program integrates with search engine results from popular search engines and also adds an icon to the browser toolbar that indicates whether a site is safe to use, or should be used with caution.
If McAfee SiteAdvisor has negative information for a site, you can review a very detailed report that shows any spam received from that site, harmful downloads, and association with other sites.
With all this new info in hand I was ready to wage war against the infections.After a LOT of time and effort, and TONS of moaning and groaning....
Victory is mine!!OH YES!!
Now That I have successfully cleaned, purged, and reworked my computer system things seem to be going much faster and working as well as it did the day I got the contraption.
However...I have learned one thing...
Things will be different with this system for now on....
I have a plan and...
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3 comments:
Isn't it amazing how much time we spend battling our PC and the vicious virus nonsense!! Glad to hear you won the battle.
What do I need to do to make your great list of blogs?
First thing you should do is ditch IE, use Firefox instead. It is a much safer browser. You also need to be very careful about the sites you visit. A lot of questionable sites will do some pretty nasty things like popping-up an alert saying something to the effect of 'your computer is infected with spyware, click here to remove it', or 'your system is not optimized, click here to speed up your system'. just close out the popup by hitting Alt-F4, then get off that page immediately.
If you have a little bit of tech knowledge and are brave you can just dump Windows all together and run Linux.
"windows security" used to be an oxymoron, it's gotten better but there are still lots of holes. Linux is far superior when it comes to security. It also helps that there are virtually no viruses, trojans, or spyware written for Linux.
Larry, I loved this posting. Hang in there!
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