Malware is Malicious

All was peaceful.

All was comfy.

Until…DS disturbed my deep slumber yesterday morning.

“Mother, I’ve gotta go out today!”

Groggy, 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 that’ll change 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.

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 my suspicion was correct.

I restarted DS’s computer intent on bringing the system up in SafeMode but the function key didn’t work properly. Instead of wasting 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 of a corrupted system.

Once the computer was up, I went online. Norton has a virus and spyware tool called “Power Eraser”, which I downloaded. After installation, I followed the prompts to do a scan. Only one file marked “BAD” and I removed it immediately.

A system restart message flashed 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 (it’s 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. Thankful for being spared from any real hair pulling and gnashing of teeth with this ugly bug partially locking down DS’s laptop. It could be a lot worse than it turned out.

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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