Halloween Came A Day Early

[silverscreenselect]

No treats; just two very bad tricks that cyberspace played on me.

Somehow, I picked up a really, really, really, really, really, really nasty virus called a Poweliks Trojan. It kept trying to connect with external sites that, if successful would have loaded a ton more bad stuff on my computer (the main site is called fffseedotcom, a notorious spamware site). I have Malwarebytes and Norton on my computer and they blocked the outgoing attempts. Unfortunately, the Trojan kept trying to connect over and over which quickly used up all the available system resources and memory. I had to go into Task Manager and close all the processes while the virus kept opening up more, so it was kind of like playing Whack-a-Mole until the virus stopped doing it a few minutes later. Then a few hours more and it would start all over again.

Of course, neither Norton nor Malwarebytes indicated I had any malware on my system because this virus disguises itself as a registry key which doesn't show up in scans. I did some research and found that a few dozen people had reported the problem on various computer repair boards so I asked for help and it took me two days to get the computer cleaned (I had to install five different programs and run an online scan to make sure everything got caught) but I seem to be okay for now.

The other bit of bad news I learned was that my blog had disappeared off my host server. I was setting up a Wordpress blog and had set up a subdirectory in the Silverscreenvideos directory and it just vanished. I had called Network Solutions a few days earlier to report another problem with my updates not going through on my site and they did some type of refresh to solve that problem and I'm convinced that's what caused the blog directory to disappear. They backup my site for seven days, but I'm not sure when this happened (I don't work on the blog most days) and I didn't want to lose all the work on my site in the last week if I was wrong, so bottom line is I'm rebuilding the blog from scratch. At least I remember most of the options I'd selected to get it looking the way I wanted and the plugins I'd already installed. It's just more work down the drain.

Two tricks.
No treats.

[ghostjmf]

And people kind of wonder why I'm reluctant to go get my own system, instead of relying on systems in libraries & computer labs that are generally less susceptible to attacks like this.

Within days of getting an I-phone that linked back to their I-pad & laptop, someone I know had all 3 frozen by some space invader. Took hours & hours to clear up.

[Bob Juch]

While Trojan.Poweliks is unique in how it resides on a computer, it can arrive on a computer through more common methods, such as malicious spam emails and exploit kits.

Poweliks has reportedly been delivered through malicious spam emails that claim to be a missed package delivery from the Canadian Post or the U.S. Postal Service (USPS).

[silverscreenselect]

I get those and never open them. I also get a lot of "Click here to claim your free gift card from [some retailer]." I don't open those either, but obviously somehow this got through and did a royal number on my computer.

The program that found it and allowed me to delete it was something called RogueKiller. RogueKiller differs from some of these other antivirus programs because it actually stops malicious processes long enough to allow you to delete a virus (some of them have defense mechanisms built in designed to prevent people from deleting them).