All was peaceful.
All was comfy.
Until...DS disturbed my deep slumber yesterday morning.
"Mother, I've gotta go out today!"
Groggily, I replied. "But, it's raining."
" I have to!"
"Why?"
"Come here, I'll show you."
The clock beside my bed read a few minutes past 8 o'clock. It was time to get up anyhow. I shuffled into the dining room which has evolved into command central over the years and our beautiful Ethan Allen table used as a desk. One day things will be different, but that's a story for another time. I plopped down in front of DS's computer.
He pressed the power button. "There is something seriously wrong with my computer."
"What's the problem?"
"I don't know. There was a pop-up with lots of words...."
"Was it a blue screen with a file name?"
"No. Just wait, you'll see what I'm talking about," he fidgeted worriedly.
The computer flashed a blue screen. Next, his desktop background with no icons and then this warning message appeared....
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| Image Source Credit |
After a few seconds the pop-up disappeared, but I could not do anything on DS's user period.
My instinct told me this was a virus. I quickly darted to our Mac and checked with my buddy, Google and sure enough my suspension was accurate.
I restarted the computer intent on bringing the system up in SafeMode, but the function key didn't work properly. Instead of waisting the restart, I decided to try logging into the admin user. It worked with no problem what-so-ever. The computer's response time lagged slower than usual. Another symptom the system was corrupted.
Once the computer was up, I went online. Norton has a virus & spyware tool called Power Eraser, which I downloaded. After installation, I followed the prompts to do a scan. A single file was marked as "BAD", which I immediately removed.
A system restart message flashed in order to complete the process. After getting the computer through that phase, I wanted to make sure any threat that could have been there was not hiding elsewhere on DS's computer. I updated Anti-Virus one more time (its set to do Auto Updates) and performed a "Full" system scan. This took some time to complete. Finally, after Norton's deep inspection through more than 600,000 files, the only flags waved were from a handful of trace cookies.
A sigh of relief washed over me. This could have been a huge mess. Thankfully, we were spared any real hair pulling and gnashing of teeth with this ugly bug partially locking down DS's laptop.
Just a friendly reminder, be sure to always keep your computer's security program up-to-date and run a deep scan regularly. Malware is malicious!
1. Has your computer been infected with this particular malware or other crimeware recently?
2. Do you have computer protection software on your system? If so, tell us what you do and do not like about it?
Visit Miss Jenny and the rest of the Alphabe-Thursday classroom for more homework assignments of the letter "M" and while you're hopping around, be sure to play along with Miss Amanda in her latest edition of Thursday Two Questions.
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18 comments:
I am SUPER paranoid about such things so I run scans and malware sweeps regularly. I also try to stick to sites that I don't think will have malware, though it is said anyone's blog can be susceptible: someone attaches a worm to a page without your knowledge and when you visit, it automatically downloads. So, I try to do a sweep about once a week.
I learned something here, though: restarting the computer with a different user to help an ailing computer. Thank you so much! That's really helpful. :)
So many hoops to ump through to get back to business! What a headache, but a great M subject. Here's mine: http://lmkazmierczak.blogspot.com/2013/02/mosaic-mosaic.html
Thanks for letting me know through my experience you took from it the tip I accidentally stumbled upon trying by logging into the Admin user. Honestly, I did not know for sure if that would work, and then afterwards I recalled a similar ordeal I had with DD#2's computer.
Oh Cathy, you are soooo good!!! I could never do what you did to clear up your mess. Congratulations!!!
1. I have two lap tops that are disabled because of 'something.' My older HP crashed after a MicroSoft update restart. It went to never-never-land and then nothing. Safe mode wouldn't revive anything. My newer Gateway with Windows Vista also crashed with no life what-so-ever showing.
2. I use Norton 360 on three computers here, Mrs.Jim's newer 13" Toshiba, Mrs. Jim's older 13" Averatec with XP that is now the only one that will operate our old scanner, and my newer HP`14" (we like the lighter small screened ones).
I like everthing about Norton 360 except that we always lose something with 'Identity Safe' every time we update with a newer version. What I like best is that the Norton Techs will update our computers for us, remotely, and for free. That part might be because we are seniors and they know we don't do techie stuff real good.
Jim's Alphabe-Thursday
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1) No it has not been virus infected lately.
2) I use norton, I like it, sometimes it is too much...asking me about cpu usage, and is it sage to download, run, etc
but I guess I need it to remind me to be careful what I put in my computer. I check and clean out my computer almost every day.
Sorry to hear about your troublesome virus. That's a good point you made about updating the anti virus software. Thanks!
Thanks. I think I'll go and check now.~Ames
I use Norton, but I have had malware problems in the past and they are horrible time wasters. I've spent days at a time trying to clean up my hard drive.
I am hopeless thank you for reminder
What a pain. And, no, since I bought my new laptop I have not been infected. I have AVG on mine and the computer is set to do scans etc... every evening. I have been lucky so far. What I have noticed though is that after visiting Facebook, the computer either freezes or runs very slowly, I am not sure why.
Very scary. Why do some people have nothing better to do than create maiware! Visiting for Alphabe=Thursday. Glad you were able to solve your problem so well!
The last time I had a problem was several years ago. It was a massive attack. I shut the computer down and restarted in Safe Mode. I found the problem and deleted it. I then purchased and loaded Norton 360 and I haven't had a problem since.
I like Norton and can't think of any negatives to it. It lets me know if there was a potential problem and that it was fixed. I can go to details and see what it was and how the program repaired it. The most important thing with any virus/malware program is to make sure it is updated on a regular basis. Also if you use Windows be sure the automatic updates are turned on.
I had one so vicious once it fried my mother board so I am very careful about having active anti-virus and running it consistently, in fact I just finished.
A good reminder.....some nights I don't even shut down my laptop....that was kind of a new year's resolution that I would stop that bad habit. but I haven't done a Full scan in awhile.
glad it all worked out.
This is such a timely tip, Cathy! Thank you sooo much!!!!
GREAT save on your part. I'm impressed!
=)
So glad you got to rescue your DS computer. That is scary when that happens.
I have AVG and it does the daily scan. I need to ensure it's updated.
Thank you for sharing Cathy.
Have a great weekend!
happy you got it fixed. thank you for adding your wonderful blog to the Thursday Favorite Things hop. xo
My husband and I both home office so we have a lot of firewalls. We have a service that also scans our computers each night.
Once in awhile, though, malware gets through and I find myself both annoyed and angered.
I wish the people who had all this time to wreak havoc would try and do some good in the world.
Grrrrr.
Grrrrr.
I'm glad you got the problem fixed!
Thanks for linking.
A+
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