Friday, September 19, 2008

WARNING: Don't go here!

I just had a Trojan worm threaten my computer so I'm warning everyone off the site that seemed to cause it. It is www dot flexequity dot com. Don't go there!

I just received my bank statement with a flyer advertising their flex equity advantages. Being a curious person, I wanted to find out exactly what flex equity is since I've only had a vague idea about it. So I googled, "What is flex equity?" The second site listed (and the first one I selected) was the above site.

My computer almost immediately flashed into alarm mode, warning me a minute later that I had 3 instances of a Trojan worm. (Okay, my lack of knowledge is showing here--there were 3 lines of warnings that I think meant I had 3 places of attack.) I froze, knowing that if I touched anything I might be downloading a worm so I did the first safe thing that occurred to me. I called my husband. This is what he told me to do:

  1. Turn off my computer immediately by pressing and holding the power button.
  2. Unplug certain cords from internet access. Since I wasn't sure which cords to unplug, I pulled all the plugs from our router and modem that would come.
  3. Then, and only then, he told me to turn the computer back on (without reconnecting the cable or router.)
  4. I opened Windows normally and waited for it to fully load.
  5. Once it opened normally, I reconnected the modem and router.
Internet restored, but I'm feeling much less sure of looking things up on the 'net. What if this had happened to one of my kids? Would they have pressed the button to activate whatever it was the program wanted to download? Ugly. What if this had happened to my parents?

Of course, they probably wouldn't have been looking up anything remotely related to that topic. Does the saying, "Curiosity killed the cat," apply here?

1 comment:

Mrs. Darling said...

I cant tell you how often I have done that. My poor husband cant figure out how I can pick up so many viruses. I cant figure it out either. Its awful that you cant just surf where you want!