I’ve been a hardcore Mac person most of my life. From the Mac Plus to the boxy Quadra to the Blueberry iMac to the tidy whitey iBook I’m typing this on, I’ve had ’em all. When I bought my retail business it came with a PC that had a kick ass POS system. When I closed the business, I brought it home and made it our main home computer since it’s newer and more powerful than the aformentioned lap top.
I’d never had a trojan horse virusy thing until today. The HP PC went berserk and was seized by a message telling me that the Feebs were coming to get me if I didn’t race out and buy a cash card at CVS. I was allegedly an internet scoflaw being punished for scofflaw-itude. I needed mybusiness PC guy to help me regain control from the Ransomware virus. He did it from Denver too. Thanks for logging on, Dave.
Now that the bastard has been vanquished I’m using that anti-malware scanner thing a helluva lot more often. Hmm, I wonder if I can somehow blame Carly Fiorina or Meg Whitman for this…
A clarification: by “POS” do you mean “Point of Sale” or “Piece of Shit”?
I hope you’ve learned your lesson.
Both.
Haven’t seen that one, but have spent much time rooting out similar crap on client workstations. Well, it’s a living.
I guess most people using Windoze already have some sort of AV software, but, if anyone doesn’t, at the very least download and install Microsoft Security Essentials. It’s free and actually does a pretty decent job of isolating/containing most threats.
Malwarebytes is also pretty good, but costs money, as does Symantec Anti-Virus.
Or get a Mac.
The last option, for genuine geeks, is some flavor of Linux, but even I haven’t gone there…yet…well, except for the time I tried DSL — Damn Small Linux — on an old laptop that was otherwise little more than a bookend at that point.
Had a version of Symantec. It failed. Dave installed some new malware and spyware on PC. Cannot afford a new mac right now.
If you already know this, apologies for being a nerd and a busybody, but don’t forget to regularly run updates on the anti-malware and anti-spyware programs. Some allow you to preset that for once a day/once a week. Your computer guy may have done that already…
To make it worse, a security newsletter I follow had the following bad news.
For years, computers have shipped from the with a full complement of free trial versions of software and other plain junk. On getting a computer, one had the enjoyment of spending endless hours deleting this crapware.
Recently it was found that some computers were shipping from certain factories containing full-blown virus spyware. Much of it hard to delete (I’m suspicious that they may have been trying to imply rootkit).
It is up in the air if this was the brilliant idea of somone in the factory (corporate espionage or an individual in the factory to either discredit the factory or get out their own little network of zombies), the Chinese Govt (obvious intention of either suppressing dissidents in China or getting company secrets from the US and Europe), or other govt including USA.
Also, in the past couple of days was a story on a newsletter where the FTC has banned certain computer rental companies from using spyware based on finding such (including key loggers and surrepticious pictures) on rental computers
http://www.infopackets.com/news/security/2012/20121002_ftc_catches_pc_rental_stores_spying_on_customers.htm