But this night a virus managed to get onto my computer. I'm very glad these people were very greedy and the virus didn't keep quiet but popped up a dozen security warnings and tried to rope me into buying their adware disguised as a "privacy protection tool and virus scanner." Because I was programming with an admin account the tool turned off the registry editor and task manager completely (along with other diagnostic tool like the applet to disable system services...)
There's nothing to fear when you can clearly see this infection. However I'm scared of viruses which keep quiet and just install a little keylogger, sending all your input like usernames and passwords and bank account/credit card numbers to someone else without me noticing.
The good news to me was that all my post-catastrophe security precautions worked nicely and I used the opportunity to update my image with new drivers and software updates. I was back in less than 2 hours without any data loss.
The tools I used:
- Macrium Reflect for partition backup
- Carbonite free 2GB backup for config file backup
- Returnil system protetion
- Secunia's Personal Software Inspector (PSI) to keep my software up to date
- BitDefender Antivirus shield
- AVG Antivirus (without antivirus shield, just for disc scans)
- TCGINA for easy user account backup (back up all your settings in one file)
- external 500 GB hard disk for backup purpose
All that's left to do is to find out where that little critter came from and plug this hole once and for all.
