Unwittingly Sending out Viruses

Woe to the shoemaker whose children have no shoes, or the baker who is without bread. I felt like this tonight when I stupidly clicked on an email claiming to be giving me a password and found my computer hijacked by the evil worm that turned out to be a malicious virus. The w32 Frethem attachment proceeded to email everyone in my Outlook mailbox the same ‘password’ file virus and I got three calls from folks telling me I had sent them a bad thing. I know, I know, never download these things.

But…I own a computer cleaning company…so I quickly got to work. I Googled the words ‘password in email’ and found the name of this bug, then got to Symantec’s website where there was a long description of the problem and a button to download the removal tool. All was fine until I couldn’t find where the downloaded solution had ended up…but then, I thought again–Just find the name of the program I used to download it, (Flashget) and look under programs to find that directory. Voila, there was my file.

This is all a good lesson but it still felt good to be able to fix it. Apologies to anyone who got the evil email I didn’t send. Just don’t open the damn thing!