How not to spend your Sunday

That was fun!

I’ve just spent the last 18 hours of my life learning more about malware removal than I ever wanted to know.

No, I’m not clueless.  We have a pretty good anti-virus set up, and I know what sort of pages and files to avoid, and yet this nasty – and difficult to remove - operator still managed to find a way in.

Alarmingly, it took a total of seven different processes/programs, several of which were lengthy and needed to be repeated in sequence a number of times, to finally flush out the offenders.  This consumed a large portion of what would otherwise have been productive writing time.

Take home messages for writers:

·       Keep your anti-nasties software and operating systems updated.

·       Back up your work to a remote location ** Make sure you do this even if you ignore everything else in this post **.

·       Get a good spyware tool to use alongside your regular virus checker.  Increasingly malware is using innocuous looking cookies as its way in.

·       Take action when your browser first starts running slowly (in hindsight, I should’ve investigated more carefully a couple of days ago when I noticed how clunky it was getting).

·       Remain calm and use the task manager to close the browser when an “attack” begins.  This can reduce the scale of file corruption.

·       Always have several punchy antivirus programs at your disposal.  Sometimes one just ain’t enough.

Fortunately, everyone else on the planet hates malware just as much I do, so there were some good how-to guides and free software available.  The only other things I needed were moral fortitude and a violet crumble.

It has been a warning to be more vigilant.  This time it was just an annoyance, but it has reminded me how close the threat of loss of data always lurks.