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Monday, September 3, 2007

Trojan Horses Almost Kicked me Off


As some of you already know, I teach ESL online. Last Friday, 31 of August, I just ended up my class just before I was about to have dinner. Suddenly, when I looked at my taskbar, an old student's Messenger window highlighted and it caught my attention as it just kept on blinking. I might have been so excited to hear from that student. I haven't heard from him for a long time and it felt strange that he would suddenly send me something out of the blue.

Out of curiosity, I clicked on the Windows Live Messenger's conversation Window. It said, "Joe wants to send you the file mygallery5156..." Just below that, there were options as to whether, I would accept the file, save it or decline it.

Before clicking on to it, my fellow teacher Oliver came rushing to my station, "Who's that student Joe?" "He just sent me the same file but I did not open it," he said just as soon as I had started extracting the file. "Don't open it, that could be a virus," Oliver added. Knowing Joe for a long time, my instinct just told me that he would not have the guts to be sending me some viruses. I just successfully made a zipped copy of the file attempted to open it but it would not show me any pictures.

"Oliver was right," I thought. I quickly deleted the files and ran my virus scanner. Later, it found no virus. While having classes in the evening, I just noticed that the virus was like automatically sending itself to all my online contacts. Two of my classes got disrupted because my computer would freeze and I could not click on anything. I had to apologize to my students several times. I even had to log out and log back in just to deal with the onset of the virus. I got a little bit agitated that there were moments I was denied of opening any Messenger Window.

A few minutes again after that, another teacher told me that her computer just froze. Oliver and I just found out that she herself received the virus and it almost ruined her computer. She had to use another PC because her computer just kept on blinking, any application would not finish processing because the desktop or the screen monitor would refresh every after a few seconds or so.

It so happened Oliver had his USB and had some AVG Virus scanner setup. He quicky installed it on the PC and it healed the damage.

Thinking that my PC was safe since I ran F-Prot Antivirus Scanner, I turned off my computer, left work, unmindful of the fact that there could be some virus which the scanner was just unable to detect.

After my days off when I got back to work, I just realized that my computer has started blinking and it could not run processes. It would not let me open the files on the desktop though I could access the Internet explorer without any trouble.

When Oliver came to work, my hopes beamed that he could fix the problem. The blinking on the PC though would not let him install the AVG scanner on my PC through his flash drive. The more I got worried and I was very uneasy. I couldn't concentrate at work.

Out of nowhere, It just crossed my mind to get some help online since I had the ability to browse the Internet and I was actually logged in to Blogcatalog. Thanks to Chris for the link he provided to get rid of the virus.

After running the scanner, two types of Trojan Horse Viruses were moved into the the vault and my computer was back to normal. That day I sounded so techie that I started informing my students about it.

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5 comments:

paisley said...

i have had one virus in my life,,, and i thank god that is all... i never open weirdo stuff... but i as are we all am still vulnerable... good thing you got right on it and got it taken care of....

Staggo"s List said...

Here is a link which talks about a virus very much like the one you experienced. It invades your contacts list and sends out virus as if you sent them.

http://www.briankaneonline.com/2007/09/04/friends-dont-let-friends-use-quechup/

LORD MANILA STONE said...

thanks for the link staggo, i will definitely check that out^^

Fruity said...

I had it once and that is more than enough. My pc went to bed after that. Those creators got nothing better to do... Cheer from Fruity

LORD MANILA STONE said...

hi fruity, good to see you here, if i see those creators, they'd better be ready...hmmph...(LOL)