The story of a virus attack.....

At home, on the Saturday morning before Christmas, I logged on to MySpace. My nephew had tried to add me as a friend the night before. Nothing new there so I logged off. I checked e-mail at work and just as I was replying to a budgeting question, all hell broke loose on the home computer. We were attacked by a virus so malicious that it:

1. Disabled the 'current' virus protection (PC-cillin14) and deleted the built-in recovery points (a tool which is there in case you want to go back to 'before" an incident).
2. Accessed, downloaded, opened and/or stored a Trojan download virus that kept going out to the Internet to download more viruses- you should have seen the boxes that were popping up on the screen over and over and over again......
3. Locked up the computer.

Within the next 24 hours, as the attempt to fight back continued, this attack completely shut us down - the operating system shut down to prevent damage, and the computer wouldn't even boot in Safe Mode. This was brutal.

After a complete re-formatting of the computer hard drive(s), the operating system was re-installed and the home computer is back up and operational. Luckily, we had a zip drive and had important data backed up.....so other than the time to re-install various software and drivers.....the important stuff was safe. New Year's Eve was spent re-installing drivers and virus protection, recovering data from the zip drive and installing the connection to e-mail from the service provider.

Since we have a robust firewall at our office, and MySpace was the only site I was at on Saturday morning, and we have had viruses from MySpace at least once before that were discovered and quarantined by our software...... but took significant time and effort to identify, clean up, and quarantine, I am assuming that this attack came from MySpace.

In conclusion: I wish the people well who create and use these damaging viruses and hope that they can find an outlet for their talents that would benefit society and not harm others in the future.

Reminder: Please back up your data: music, e-mail, pictures, and other important files into a safe place (maybe an external drive would be worth the money).....even to CD's if they are precious to you.