Re: My Pharmacist Friend Called Me Yesterday

On 31 Jul 2005 in alt.2600, Bitey <Bitey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> made their
contribution to mankind by stating in
news:pan.2005.08.01.02.57.39.766000@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx:

> He said he had a lot of pop-ups coming into his third computer on the
> network. He has been on vacation in Alaska for about ten days and
> while he was gone he had temp help (several pharmacists taking turns)
> from a nearby hospital filling in for him. These pop-ups didn't start
> until after he was gone. Uh huh.. Who's been looking at p0rn?
> <hehehe>
>
> Anyway, I didn't know all that so I figured he just needed to go to
> Windows Update and download some patches and told him so. He insisted
> I come over to the store and take a look. Knowing he is just about
> computer illiterate I agreed to do that.
>
> Hoo boy.. I could not get IE to even start up, the virus definitions
> were a mere 352 days out-of-date and the spyware program he uses told
> me he was LOADED with all kinds of goodies but froze when asked to
> remove them. The computer C R A W L E D, his 1GB of memory
> notwithstanding. I could do NOTHING with it! He asked me what I would
> do and I told him it would take mucho sweat and tears to clean up that
> system so I would opt to scrub the drive and start from scratch. I've
> never seen anything like that before. I mean, nothing that was more
> fouled up and packed with not only spyware, malware and at least one
> trojan - but probably several. The task manager showed me most of what
> it had going on but wouldn't allow me to stop any of the "services". I
> guess I could have gone into Safe Mode and tried a few things there
> but DAAYAMMM, I would hate to have to do it on MY machine much less
> one with pharmaceutical pricing data that needed to be saved, and on a
> machine and OS (Windows 2000) that I was not familiar with.
>
> He had the guy who originally set up the system go over there today
> and the guy told him the same thing, scrub the drive. It was THAT
> bad. I got the shivers just thinking about it and right away decided I
> needed to run a spyware and virus scan on my machine just as soon as I
> got home. Everything turned up ~clean~, thank the gods. I WILL be
> paying more attention to keeping the updates going after seeing what
> all can happen without doing it.
>

Did you shower after that horrible experience? :)

--
ThePsyko
Public Enemy #7
http://prozac.iscool.net
.

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