A Nasty Computer Virus

I was trying to catch up on all my back episodes of How I Met Your Mother. The summer after college, my obsession with seeing every episode of every season of a show started. It's the fault of Sex and the City. And my obsession has been centered on How I Met Your Mother for the last couple of days.

And so I've been watching. I've figured out ways to game megavideo.com so they don't make me wait for 30 min after every 72 minutes of viewing. But along the way, I also managed to pick up a nasty computer virus. I think I know what did it. Some random episode in Season 2 didn't have a megavideo link. So I tried another link that I'd never heard of before.

This link opened up about three windows on my computer. After sending an angry glance towards my adware blocker tab, I closed the windows and didn't give it another thought. That was Wednesday night. Sometime Thursday evening, I noticed something was off with computer. It started with a virus scan from a virus scanning program I had no memory of installing.

30 minutes later, I had already stopped the scan, and I did so because it looked off. The scan window looked suspiciously friendly. Seriously, it looked like an Easter card. And then these windows started popping up to tell me that some program.exe or another couldn't start because of a virus. They had the [x] in the upper right hand corner, but the button didn't work. But even though I stopped the scan, I was noticing other hinky things.

I pulled up my task manager to try and close the virus and I couldn't do it. The program didn't show up on my task list or process list. Now I was freaking out and worried that there was a horrible virus on my computer. Then I decided to let the virus scan run to see what the issue was. BIG MISTAKE.

At least 15 different issues popped up and different screens and different processes. This program told me that my computer was basically fucked and my only solution was to upgrade to the full program and debug my computer. That's when I noticed the bottom of the window that said it was a trial version of the program.

While other windows are coming up telling me that I have all these different processes that won't work. Then it hit me, I never downloaded this virus scanner. I never downloaded this virus scan. So I turned off my computer and thanked God I had an alternative to figure out a solution.

I googled the title of the program on my BlackBerry and my Kindle and the third item down had the word "scam" in it. I went to Yahoo answers to find out how to fix the problem. The solution was to download another program that was a malware remover. I googled that program and again the word "scam" popped up. But luckily, this time, it was talking about the scam this program could fix. And the download was free.

So I loaded my computer back up, saw that this virus scam thing had eaten my internet and the first change I had to make, fixing my internet options and proxy server, wasn't able to be fixed. I re-loaded the computer in safe mode and fixed that issue.

I downloaded the program, ran the scan, and suddenly, everything was all better. I re-started the computer in regular mode and crossed my fingers. As soon as it loaded back up, everything was better again and I started writing this blog post.

The moral of the story? 1. Have multiple ways to access the internet. Thank God for my Blackberry and my Kindle.   2. Don't assume your memory is faulty. That's why God made Google.   3. Everything that they charge you for, there is probably a way to get the free download version of it too.   4. Don't click random links, stick with megavideo.com!