Wow. Finally nailed by a virus after all these years. I’ve been fooling around with PC’s since 1992 and this is the first time I’ve personally gotten a virus. I’ve helped friends, family, and paying customers rid their systems of viruses they’ve picked up, but I’ve never gotten one myself because I’ve always been VERY careful. But this time I was blindsided. I visited a website I visit often, a free dating site, and BAM. Windows installer popped up, then poofed. I thought “what the heck was that?” Then suddenly I lost the ability to go to a different website. (I was using IE at the time). Then IT popped up. I knew what it was the moment it appeared… “AntiVirus System Pro”. It told me I had viruses on my computer and started a scan. At that instant I disconnected from my LAN. Then started my anti-virus program running. While it was running, I got popups saying I was infected… and that I should buy the full version of AntiVirusSystemPro etc… I tried to “CTRL-ALT-DEL” and only got an error message. I tried to get to “Control Panel” only to again get an error message. WOW. Eventually my anti-virus software found the problems: W32:Agent-AEKI and W32:Crypt-FOQ. After they were deleted, and I rebooted, everything seemed fine again, but IE no longer worked. It was corrupted. So I had to use FireFox till I figured out how to fix IE. I eventually got IE going again, and all is back to normal now, but… WOW. I didn’t click on an attachment, install anything… but got a virus anyway simply by going to a favorite website. HOW does THAT happen? How did I miss that possibility? Anyone out there that can shed some light on how to prevent future infections?
