Virus Attacks, Virus Defeated!

I spent Friday evening spewing expletives as I battled a bad computer virus or malware or whatever you call the nasty little bugger that completely effs up your machine. The malware placed three fake security icons on my desktop (Error Cleaner, Privacy Protector and Spyware & Malware Protection) and a fake security alert window kept popping up encouraging me to go to a dubious website for assistance as my elderly PC laptop coughed up blood and my browsers and email slowly and painfully choked and sputtered and eventually froze.

I know what you’re thinking, “Jeff, how did you get this virus?” and “I’m bored to death already.”

To answer your first question, let’s just say there is no lost “bikini shoot” episode of The Facts of Life and the Russian video site that claimed to have it does not offer a legit Quicktime update. Just a word to the wise, now back to the problem…

This was a very clever piece of black hat hacker maliciousness: It disabled my Task Manager so I could not force quit programs and I was not able to do a System Restore, even in safe mode. The feeble virus protection I was running did nothing to help, nor did the much-heralded Spyboy Search and Destroy. After googling (note: I refuse to capitalize google when I verb it) a bit and downing two delicious Boddingtons to calm my rage, I was directed to my new white hat hero: SmitFraudFix.

This lovely tool removes “Desktop Hijack malware” in an extremely easy-to-use manner. I downloaded the the application on my Mac, burned to CD, popped it into my ailing PC in safe mode, installed it, ran it and about 20 minutes later, my machine was saved! I did my worst Tangina from Poltergeist impression aloud, “This house is clean!” and with one minute to spare, I joined my wife for our weekly viewing of “The Soup” (all hail Joel McHale)! Another celebratory beer followed.

It’s weird, but when one of my computers is “sick,” I also feel sick, maybe violated is a better word. Since I use these machines for work, when they’re not functioning well, neither am I. How sad is that? My well-being is so closely tied to a blinking metal box. Ugh.

Please note, I’m a Mac guy by trade and I’m sure all you PC geeks will find fault with everything I mentioned above, but this fix worked and I didn’t have to shell out money to get it fixed. I did think about donating to the author of this fine code (I think he’s French), but the PayPal link I was directed to wanted “€ EUR” and I was not about to get involved in that euro nonsense. I’m sure I would get the currency conversion wrong and end up buying the guy a new Citroën.

Be safe out there, kids. Happy surfing!

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