Be Careful Out There

Be careful while you are surfing the internet out there. Even the most innocuous site can be infected. I simply visited a few book blogs this morning, and the mere act of visiting them got me infected with a particularly malicious little bug, which actually hid my entire C:/ drive from me!

I'm not positive, since I won't go back to the site to confirm it, but I think that it was Rundpinne's site that got me. I had, I think, three sites open and was visiting one when I had a message pop up about a script having trouble. I chose to "Stop" the script, and I think that was my big mistake, as I think they used that common window as a launch for the bug. Next thing I knew, I saw DOS windows pop up and close. I thought that was suspicious, and I went to check out the other tabs that I had open, and saw at the top of one of the blogs it mentioned a script error. Then I suddenly got "hard drive failure" messages, which made me really suspicious-- this is a common ploy with malware. Then I got other messages, and a Windows XP Restore window opened and started "scanning". I stopped it, as I didn't believe it to be legit, and called my computer techs.

They confirmed that this is an ugly one that they've been seeing lately. What makes it so bad is the fact that it actually hides all of the user's files from them. Nothing could be opened or used or accessed. We wound up having me go into Safe Mode, and had to launch Internet Explorer from "Run", which was one of the only things that would work (thank God I could still access my Start menu!). So I was able to initiate a remote session with my tech guys and was lucky enough to have all of my data stored on a server and not locally on my system. They are still working to see whether they can restore my system without having to reinstall everything. But right now, it isn't looking good.

Ugh! So, I can't say for sure that it was Rundpinne's blog that did it, but that is the one that I have in my mind as being the one with the script error. Unfortunately I don't know her email address, so I can't contact her to alert her. If anyone here knows how to get in touch with her by some means other than her blog, you might alert her that her site could be infected.

So now I fear visiting any blogs, as even an innocuous book blog can house a big nasty just waiting to infect my system! Be careful out there, my blogging friends!