Trojan War!

Hi there!

Okay, the hottest topic on 3 or 4 of my favorite chat forums, has been "Trojan Viruses". Quite a few of my friends got a REAL nasty virus. Some were able to repair it themselves, while others had to take it into their Geek Store. Either way, these nasty viruses are time consuming and/or money chompers... neither picture is very good.

There are SOOOO many variables and it's fairly frustrating. I'd LOVE to be able to help people with their problems, but....

Do you have a PC or an Apple?
What kind of anti-virus do you run?
Do you have a firewall?
What did you click on when the problem occurred?
And more more tech questions that I can't think of, right now.

And here's the all important question and suggestion...

Do you do a monthly backup? There's probably TONS of backup programs out there but "Acronis True Image" is THE best, IMHO!!!!

With Acronis, you do your backup, once a month. Computer crashes. Re-plug in your external hard drive. Recover your info. Info is recovered in approx. 15 minutes. ALL your settings, ALL your passwords, ALL your softwares, etc, etc, etc.... Even your files or pictures that your saved on your desktop.. are ALL STILL THERE! Your favorites are still intact!!!!

Now, I'm being a bit of a motor mouth, right now... but let me tell you what happened to Gilbert and I 'bout 3 years ago.

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Our internet provider wrote TWO warning (English) emails, advising us that we had a virus. Tried to translate their emails (to French) to Gilbert but (yes he's a man) he didn't take them too seriously.

Perhaps 2 weeks later, we lost our internet services. Gilbert spent like 1 hour re-plugging modem, server, router and whatever hi-tech thingy that I can't remember right now and doing the "re-boot" thingy, too. BTW, we had forgotten about those 2 previous letters from our internet provider.

We finally called up our internet provider and they told us that we had a virus, that un-beknown to us, was forwarding thousands and thousands of emails, from our home!!!! We argued with them. IMPOSSIBLE!!! We had the "bought" version of Norton!!!

Nothing doing! They were NOT going to re-connect us until we got rid of this so-called virus or trojan virus or whatever it was.

Gilbert did a COMPLETE "Norton" scan on ALL our computers - nothing. Nada. Zippo.

At this point, we KNEW we didn't have a virus (as per Norton's results) but we couldn't make our internet provider believe us!

Finally, in desperation, I called up our local Geek Store and the guy laughed when I told him that what had happened. He said that McAfee and Norton were basically jokes. And since we had no internet, he downloaded a disk with "AVG" anti-virus on it.

Took his disk home, popped it in our computer and BAM! AVG found the offender! We were stunned - I mean, who has/had a better reputation than Norton, eh? Especially since we had actually PAID for this program!!!!

Well, AVG used to be free. We have since moved onto AVAST, as our anti-virus program.

AVAST is free... it's good.... One of my bosses has a friend who works at Norad - one of the computer geeks there, I guess. THEY use AVAST!

This nasty virus, that all my friends are chatting about, has come from Facebook and mostly Webshots. I've clicked on many webshot links, since this trojan thingy appeared and NO, I haven't had any problems! *knock on wood*

Anyhow, hope my 25 cents worth of ramblings helped you ... if you have a Trojan knockin' at yer door.... :-(

Rosa