Yes, that's right, your faithful I Got Spam?! blogger got hit with a nasty virus. Ironic I know. It started when my main PC suffered a hard drive failure (yes it's been a lovely week). While I waited for my new one to arrive, I fired up my trusty Eee PC (great little device by the way) and got back online. However, since it is only a week old, I hadn't gotten around to installing the long list of Windows updates waiting. That was my downfall-well that and opening a downloaded .exe file without scanning it first. The site had been recommended by some trustworthy people so I let my guard down and got me a nice helping of one win32/Gaelicum.A. It's been spreading it's filth across the net since 2006. Microsoft patched the hole that let it do it's dirty work-but as I said before I hadn't gotten around to installing the updates yet. This bugger is really nasty. First it infects every .exe file on your computer, then it goes into your email and sends itself to every one of your contacts, and then downloads a trojan from a remote server that allows the Shining piece of humanity that wrote the thing to take over your computer-and that's not all. It is network aware so it will also search out any other computers sharing the network and infect them too.

I was lucky-my computer was not connected to my router so the infection was contained to the original system-and it was prevented from emailing itself to my contacts. I was also fortunate that AVG has a removal tool available. I got on my husband's PC and downloaded it to my usb stick, ran it on my infected system and it fixed everything. I also had to delete all my system restore points, but since the computer is so new that wasn't a big deal. Now, thankfully, I'm clean again. Embarrassed and paranoid, but clean. So you see guys, malware can even get those of us who are supposed to know better-and really I do. My brain obviously suffered a BSOD or something. Okay Linux folks, you can stop laughing now! :-)
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