At some point on Friday afternoon, it became obvious that my everyday netbook had acquired a virus of some kind. It was running slow, random pop-ups were, well, popping up. And then it seemed like my entire hard drive had been wiped.
I don’t know how or where my machine picked up the little nasty and mysteriously it had managed to sneak past past my AVG protection. But it was well and truly embedded.
I was reasonably relaxed because I back up frequently and whilst I would lose some files if I went nuclear and completely wiped the machine, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. But nonetheless I embarked into the world of internet forums to find out what my machine had and how it could be cleared. It took several hours of hunting to find out, double-check and get the instructions.
On Saturday morning, I ran the scans and used the blasters and now happily my little machine is back to normal and running fine. Although, all told, I probably spent six hours sorting the issue out.
It serves as a useful reminder and I suggest that everyone checks they are protected and also has a plan B. Here’s what I suggest:
- Check your virus protection is all up to date and tickety-boo. Run a scan.
- Set a regularly updated restore point for your machine and make sure you won’t lose too much information if the worse does happen.
- Set up a back-up off your main machine so that precious files are duplicated. And try and back up frequently.
- If possible, have a spare machine to hand so that you can continue working if your main machine has been immobilised after an attack.
3 Responses
This is overlooked way to many times. I virus on a small business network can be a huge inconvenience. The smart thing to have is a router that uses some type of url filtering service, not just a firewall. That coupled with up to date virus and malware software on all the individual machines in the network. Your security plan is only as strong as your weakest PC so they all need to be protected.
Can you give me any additional details? I have 2 web developers that came in this morning and their HD’s were completely blank as far as we can tell, no partition, no files, the normal MBR fix does nothing, sector data scans are coming back with no files or directories found. Like it was a complete HD secure wipe. Was this similar for you?