Readuponit: Travel and voracious reading

Max Hartshorne, travel website editor, sharing some of the stuff I read, hear and see with you. Updated every day. Click on the photos to enlarge them.

Unwittingly Sending out Viruses

by Max Hartshorne on November 16, 2005

Woe to the shoemaker whose children have no shoes, or the baker who is without bread. I felt like this tonight when I stupidly clicked on an email claiming to be giving me a password and found my computer hijacked by the evil worm that turned out to be a malicious virus. The w32 Frethem attachment proceeded to email everyone in my Outlook mailbox the same ‘password’ file virus and I got three calls from folks telling me I had sent them a bad thing. I know, I know, never download these things.

But…I own a computer cleaning company…so I quickly got to work. I Googled the words ‘password in email’ and found the name of this bug, then got to Symantec’s website where there was a long description of the problem and a button to download the removal tool. All was fine until I couldn’t find where the downloaded solution had ended up…but then, I thought again–Just find the name of the program I used to download it, (Flashget) and look under programs to find that directory. Voila, there was my file.

This is all a good lesson but it still felt good to be able to fix it. Apologies to anyone who got the evil email I didn’t send. Just don’t open the damn thing!

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