Nasty Adware

My wife got panicked by a phony virus warning and clicked on it and installed a nasty piece of adware that keeps popping up with bogus warnings of horrible Trojans and viruses. Its purpose was to con us into buying their product, Personal AV.

If you have an anti-virus program on your computer (and if you don’t, you’re asking for trouble) then the only warnings that should be popping up are from that program, not from “Windows.” If you get such a message, just close your browser fast, and stop going to sites that have these tricky programs.

What made the program particularly nasty was that although the windows had buttons that said “Close” and the program folder in the Start menu had an “Uninstall” command, they  were bogus. In fact, the program installs itself in such a way that you cannot remove it manually. And these stupid “warnings” were popping up every few seconds!

More frustrating, it slipped right past Norton Internet Security. Boo!

A Google search revealed what I was dealing with, and also the program that helped root it out:
MalwareBytes (Get a free version here). Once downloaded, click on it to install and follow the directions. Be aware that the Quick Scan took over an hour.

The difference between the free version and the commercial version is that the commercial version has real-time updates and works in the background, while the free version only works when you click on it and is not monitoring your system constantly.

Back it up! Part One

My goodness, has it been so long since I posted anything new? <sigh> School gets in the way so much.

Speaking of school, our colleague’s anguish over having his flash drive (memory stick) go south (yes, it can happen; it’s never happened to me, bli ayin hara, ptoo, ptoo ptoo) got me to thinking about the importance of backing up our precious files. I’ve got 15 years worth of worksheets, vocabulary pages, tests, quizzes, sources et cetera sitting on my computer. What if God forbid something happened to it? (Stolen, broken, etc.)

There are a few ways we can back up our files. Simple ways include copying what’s on our flash drive to our home computers. Click Start, My computer, find your drive, open it, select all (ctrl+A) and click Copy selected items on the left menu. Create a backup file on your hard drive and copy it.

Do it often. Every night before you go to bed, like brushing your teeth.

Of course, if you’re robbed or hit with a flood or something, you’re still in trouble.

If you have a CD burner drive (or even better, a DVD burner), once a month or even more, you should copy all your important files (especially, teachers, all your documents, tests, etc.) on to a CD. They’re so cheap you can afford to do it often. (I correct myself – they’re inexpensive; I’m cheap.) Store the backup CD away from your computer.

In a future post we’ll discuss more radical means of saving your material, including free internet backup sites. So if God forbid you have a fire, your files will be safe in cyberspace.