Happy New Year! Wanna know what I got for Christmas? A big, fat computer virus! Woo!!
So instead of spending time writing yesterday, I had to tangle with the damaging remnants of what some stupid geek thought was cool. You know, you read articles about how software like this ends up costing millions (if not billions) in lost data and productivity. Given what a pain in the neck it was to get rid of, I don't doubt those numbers.
I had just put my feet up in preparation for watching the Tournament of Roses parade. A glass of egg nog had been poured, with freshly-grated nutmeg even. I even had a CD to be ripped for some post-parade writing. Oh yes, I was ready. (Note to the confused: OK, I know what you're thinking...that there's just no way I give a hoot about the parade. Ah, very perceptive of you! The truth is that I wanted to watch the premier of Genevieve Gorder's Dear Genevieve that was to follow the parade telecast, and I didn't trust the scheduling. I know, it's pathetic. Sometimes I just can't help myself).
Ahem...
The parade starts and it couldn't have been more than 30 seconds in before Mary Hart makes some really lame joke about something or other and my attention began to wander. I look down at my laptop and notice an instance of Internet Explorer that's been resized to about an inch square. Hmmm. Then another instance pops up, loaded with some site having to do with quick & easy virus removal. Uh Oh. After about fifteen or twenty clicks I realize that there's no way to kill this off and more and more IE boxes keep popping up. A short victory was had by using the task manager to kill off the program. After that I notice some new desktop icons pointing to BDSM and lesbian sites. Now, I have nothing against lesbians or bondage and S&M-related material, but it's hard to trust things that just appear on your screen. So I delete the icons and within five seconds they reappear. Great.
Rather than deal with this immediately, I decide that a holding-pattern is appropriate. I abandon both the parade and the computer to go outside and clear the driveway. Nothing focuses the mind like wielding a snow shovel and snowblower in five-degree weather. When I discovered that the shoot direction cable was frozen, I just knew it was going to be a long day. I pulled the snowblower into the garage for a quick thaw and went out to start using the old manual method. One hour and one successfully operational snowblower later and it was time to head back inside.
Article comments
1 - Pico
Extended electric outage, internet outage and now this. Geez, Mark, what did you do to piss off the gods so much?
2 - Porter
Mark...do you know how I can get my hands on a recording of the Rose Parade?
3 - CJ
I was hit with the exact same virus on New Years Even morning. I have been working for three days trying to get rid of it, but as you point out, it blocks any and all help sites. It also disables the restore function. Could you please share what program detected and removed the offending code?