Computer Virus

It's been a crazy week. Tuesday night while I was working, I received an urgent telephone call from Brady. He had accidentally down loaded the Trojan horse virus. Yikes!! Luckily, he was smart enough to pull the telephone line from the outlet. He was very distraught, to say the least. He wanted me to fix it while I was working, tell him what to do with the computer. Of course, I couldn't do anything without being in front of the computer. I told him we would do a computer restore and see if that fixed it. Then he called me again trying to fix it and said that this debugger program told us that we had 85 viruses on the computer and we should activate the Microsoft fix. I told him that I didn't know without being home and on the computer. We discussed it and Brady pushed the 'active' button. Then after thinking about it for a while, I told him that he needed to quit pushing buttons on the keyboard, keep the phone cord unplugged and wait until I got home.

He was so very sad when I returned home. DISTRAUGHT!!! I told him it was OK - nobody got hurt, nobody died, nothing bad happened to something important - it is just a piece of hardware and we would get it fixed. I tried to help him feel better - because it wasn't something he did on purpose, it was an accident.

Anyway, the Microsoft program that was running had me quite curious. I pushed the activate button and it directed me to a "Microsoft" website to activate a fix for the virus for money, the lowest was $39.99 and they wanted my credit card number and the 3 numbers on the back of my credit card. This did not seem right to me and I quickly exited this site. I don't like the computer directing me to different sites that I didn't search for and ask for my credit card.

There were 3 desktop buttons regarding spam protection, virus protection and this Microsoft help. I pulled up the properties of these items and found that they were created the same time the virus came to my computer. It made me think that these had to be part of the Trojan horse, so I deleted them off of my computer.

I tried to do a system restore.... but it didn't do anything. So I decided that I'd better get Norton anti-virus downloaded on my system. I activated it and it seems to have fixed the virus - there were lots and the virus keeps trying to contact my system - but Norton has been protecting me.

It's been scary, but I feel we are protected and things have worked out fine. It was really smart that Brady unplugged the phone line connection - so that it didn't completely download the virus and wipe out my hard drive. Over all, we have been blessed by not having a complete failure. It IS really scary though how quickly a virus can sneak into your computer and take your information. I once again searched my computer to make sure there isn't any personal or financial data on the computer at risk. I believe I am protected and safe - but it was scary.

I haven't blogged much through the week as I have been trying to protect myself on the computer. We've been very blessed.