Thursday, January 22, 2009

Where’s An Exorcist When You Need One?

Yesterday evening I was surfing the web, clicking through blogs just to see what other people were writing, and how they format and design their blogs. I was innocently clicking the ‘Next Blog’ hyperlink that you see in the Navbar that is at the top of most blogspot blogs. I don’t recommend doing that! After leaping through several interesting blogs, I landed on a blog that downloaded a malware bot on my machine. Even though I have anti-spyware and virus protection installed and running, I was attacked. As soon as the blog opened, I knew that it was loading something bad, so I used task manager to close down the explorer session. But it was too late. This malicious code created a pop-up that told me I was in danger and that I need to purchase ‘antiviruspro’ to protect myself. It also disabled the automatic update in my Windows security center. I could not manually reset it. It also opened multiple sessions of Internet Explorer, and as I was trying to close them, more kept opening. I ended up having to manually shut down my computer. Next, I researched ‘antiviruspro’ on the virus and spyware forum at http://www.cnet.com/. It is a particularly nasty one. It even prevents you from running programs that it knows will destroy it. I followed the numerous suggestions of poor folks who also had the misfortune of being infected. I stayed up past midnight last night running various apps and ran more all day today. Almost 24 hours later, I think the issue is resolved, but only time will tell.

I notified blogspot, but I don’t know how long it will take them to remove the blog. I do know I’m not going to visit it to check!

3 comments:

  1. Hi! I found you on gollum's sidebar and have popped in for a visit. This is good info and always timely! Enjoy the rest of your weekend.

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  2. Yikes! It always amazes me how prolific malware and spy ware is.

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