Re: My Pharmacist Friend Called Me Yesterday

On Mon, 01 Aug 2005 17:55:29 +0200, ThePsyko escaped from the straight
jacket long enough to type:

> 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 were a mere 352 days out-of-date and the spyware program he uses told me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? :)

or at least get some free samples from the shelves behind the counter?

--
Solbarth
.

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