Friday, August 28***
I took care of last-minute work details in preparation for the long vacation. A week and some change, and just in time. I'm getting really burnt out.
I started downloading a couple of audio books for the trip. But one of the books was taking way too long to trickle down from bit torrent, and someone recommended another bt site. Immediately upon visiting the site, my pc was infected with kernel-level malware. All I did was click the search field to make sure the focus was in there, and before I could type more than a couple of characters into it, Avast! was screaming bloody murder. Shortly after, Windows was giving me even scarier virus infection warnings. Or rather, "Windows" was. It ran a fake scan on my computer and tried to get me to buy something called Total Defender. To its credit, it wasn't a bad fake. But only a fool would type their credit card info into something that popped up on their computer.
I panicked. As I tried to get some help from the inn, whatever was on my computer was hatching eggs in the C:\ root and changing my wallpaper to pigeon-english. Textured with 0s and 1s, it was a dead giveaway that I had some sort of infection.
WARNING YOUR’RE IN DANGER! YOUR COMPUTER IS INFECTED WITH SPYWARE!
ALL YOU DO WITH COMPUTER IS STORED FOREVER IN YOUR HARD DISK.
WHEN YOU VISIT SITES, SEND E-MAILS… ALL YOUR ACTIONS ARE
LOGGED. AND IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO REMOVE THEM WITH STANDART TOOLS.
YOUR DATA IS STILL AVAILABLE FOR FORENSICS. AND IN SOME CASES
FOR YOUR BOSS, YOUR FRIENDS, YOUR WIFE, YOUR CHILDREN.
Every sit you or somebody or even something, like spyware, opened in your browsers,
with all images, and all downloaded and maybe later removed movies or mp3 songs -
ARE STILL THERE and could break your life!
SECURE YOURSELF RIGHT NOW!
REMOVE ALL SPYWARE FROM YOUR PC!
I tried to open the task manager and stop the related processes, but everything suddenly slammed into a complete crawl, and (I surmised later after reading up) it halted any scanning software and most but just a small handful of essential system processes. I was afraid to reboot, because I just knew that somehow screwed up my bios or something. But after a certain point, I swallowed, bit the bullet, and hit reset. And waited on a blank black screen with a white blinking cursor for an eternity. Well, this didn't bode well. And with a 30-minute work task that was half complete walled up inside my computer--a task I needed to complete before I took off for a week. At the very least, I'd have to see this through and send off my assignment before leaving town.
Leaving tomorrow morning seemed hopeless, so I called my GF and said there's no way we're leaving tomorrow morning. MAYBE the afternoon, but that's the earliest. It's probably for the best, anyway. We're both behind in packing, and that stubborn "Station" fire flared up, putting her on edge because of its proximity to the stables. But the firefighters moved back from Rancho PV, so they'll drive it back tonight.
I drove out to Frys to get a new hard drive, just in case. Got the wrong kind. How about getting an enclosure at Best Buy? Just closed. Yup, I'd have to do this in the morning. Not much you can do if your computer won't even boot to the part where you can choose Safe Mode.
Did I mention that it was in the triple digits today? Sweaty, scuzzy, ugly, smelly, headachey day.
*** Remember, time-shifted content.