I'm pretty much back on my feet after getting nailed by a trojan on Saturday morning, but I'm not yet enjoying Everyman Blissfulness. The trojan was so evil that within an hour I was running c:\>format and reloading Windows.
I've been working on the Internet for 10 years and this is the first virus/trojan/whatever that I ever encountered. I guess I was due, particularly when considering I'm using a PC provided by my company running Windows 2003 Server without any virus prevention software. I figured that since I was behind an "IP buck stops here" router appliance and knew I wasn't going to do anything stupid like launch an outlook attached .exe that I was okay. But I got hit. Porn icons on the desktop, my system tray was displaying new icons, my task manager was disabled, other nastiness like buffer-overflow messages were popping up, then finally the blue screen with the memory dump on reboot. So THAT'S what a blue screen looked like in Windows 2003 Server...
On Saturday morning when it happened I was simply catching up on my blogging and doing some reading. I had just started writing a post about Steve Ballmer supposedly throwing a chair across his office (I thought it was about damned time...), and went to John Battelle's post on the subject, then to a commenter's blog and BAM! System Tray pop-ups telling me my system was infected by Spyware and all hell braking loose.
But hey, we learn. Even old dogs like me. On repaving and reloading Windows 2003 Server I choked on the 329MBs of updates comprising W2K3 SP1 and other Microsoft Updates, but I swallowed the whole thing over the course of several hours at broadband speed. I am also proud to say that my Microsoft Word French Grammer Checker is up-to-date as well! McAfee Enterprise is now my best friend, scanning me whenever he damned-well feels like it. Life is good again, bigger and badder than ever.
I should buy myself a decent PC and load XP on it to connect to the Internet, but I can't justify buying another stupid computer. Four of them heating up my office is enough. Besides, re-virginizing a machine on occasion is not such a bad thing. On top of that, the trojan boinkin' was just what I needed to go outside and do some house painting that I've put off since June. That was my Feel Good for the day.
And I'm blogging about it. Cathartic Sweetness. Trojan? WHAT trojan????