Infected

So there I was Saturday morning, just minding my own business on our desktop PC. I wanted to read about Future of the Left, a band I've been digging lately formed by former dudes from the band McLusky. I click on a link for an NME article and suddenly I'm deluged by bogus "virus alert" popups and Viagra and porn sites. The PC was infected! Bastards. Honestly, the people who create this malware should just die already. I soon realized that the McAfree software we have was useless and it became difficult to try and do anything because nearly everything I tried was being blocked. Eventually I couldn't even access any websites.

Fortunately, we have the laptop. I put out a plea for help on Facebook and got some good advice from friends. But my old childhood buddy Dexter, who does IT work up in Toronto, got in touch and offered to remotely access the PC and check it out. I was busy yesterday, not watching that horrendous Pats game and visiting Dr. Doobs to do some recording for a series of future CompCon episodes. But I gave Dex a call tonight after work and after hitting some roadblocks, he was able to gain remote access and run anti-malware software. He's actually still doing a scan of the PC; so far, it has found 10 infected "objects." Not sure what those are, but I'm hoping it's not anything I care about like files or photos or MP3s. I have most of my iTunes library on our external hard drive, but had yet to back everything up. Rest assured I will do so when this is cleared up. Big thanks to Dex for all his help; check out his site if you run into similar problems. He's a good dude.