I recently wrote an article "Use This Formula To Have
Pleasurable And Safe Internet Access" for Home Business and
Small Business owners about protecting yourself from the
bad guys on the internet who are trying to steal your
identity, steal your passwords, break into your accounts or
just plain screw up your computer. Generally, I have been
pretty proud about going several years at a time without
getting a virus. Well, guess what? I got bit yesterday by a
Trojan Horse.
I didn't get it in an email. I got it surfing the net for
information about firewalls. I had done a Google search for
"best firewall" and was reading highly placed sites. When I
opened one, I noticed that it was trying to download a
file. I thought I had told it to not download and thought I
was successful but about three or four minutes later my
Norton Antivirus software told me that I had the
Downloader.Trojan. No kidding, I got a Trojan Horse while
looking at a Google ranked firewall site!
My antivirus program told me that it couldn't repair it
and then a couple of minutes later, it told me that it had
repaired the virus. I looked at what it said about the
Downloader.Trojan and saw that another Trojan had
piggybacked with it. The damage had already been done.
My email stopped working. At first, I thought that my
ISP's email server or one of their routers wasn't working
so I waited a few minutes and when it didn't come back I
used the online help desk of my ISP to ask if there was a
problem with their email. The help desk guy said that he
wasn't aware of any problems. He then asked me if I had a
firewall and asked me to turn it off.
My thought was "Here we go again…" They go through a long
routine of check-offs that take too many minutes and it
almost always ends up with the ISP having an outage and
nobody telling the help desk about it. I turned off my
firewall and my email started working. I thought that it
was a typical coincidence and that the network had come
back up again. I thanked him and said goodbye.
Just to test, I turned on my firewall and, oops, my email
quit working. I tested a couple of more times and got that
sinking feeling. I had gotten a Trojan Horse and it had
done damage.
I have the Norton Internet Security package. Norton is a
division of Symantec. The NIS package is a combined
firewall and antivirus system. One of the nice things about
it is a link to the Symantec Security Response Center where
they take you step by step how to remove a virus if your
Norton Antivirus Software hasn't repaired the problem.
The first thing they tell you to do is to turn off your
Windows XP restore function - a good idea if you don't want
to have the virus saved off and reinstall itself later.
Another is to put your computer in "safe mode" and rerun
your antivirus software. They also tell you how and where
to look in your system registry to remove the virus if it
is lurking there.
Because I ran the Norton Antivirus software in safe mode
it took several hours to complete. After everything was
done, I rechecked and the nasty little thing was gone.
I was prepared for my for my email to not work when I put
my computer back into normal mode. I figured that the
Trojan had probably attacked my firewall and it had. The
solution was straight forward.
I uninstalled and reinstalled my NIS and my email worked
again.
I came out of this with several take-aways:
1. Even surfing what you think are safe locations isn't
always safe.
2. I'm really glad that I have the Norton Internet
Security system. If I didn't, I'd probably have some major
problems like being a launching pad for some spam company
or worse.
3. Even when you are well protected, as I am, you can
still get into trouble.
4. Even when you have a good program like NIS, fixing the
problem isn't always painless.
As I said in my previous article, its highly important to
have a good firewall and antivirus system. There is a
constant attack going on against computers on the internet
and the attackers could put you out of business.
About the Author:
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Even Google Ranked Pages Aren't Always Safe
