Monday, November 06, 2006

Moses' Virus

We have a friend named Moses. He is a missionary with the Southern Baptists and an old friend from years ago when he was in the Ouakam church as a member. We've enjoyed his return to Senegal with his wife and young son.

Last week Moses came by the office, asking me for help with his computer. Yes. Ever since they downloaded a certain program, advertisements were popping up uninvited. It was running slowly. The firewall was showing constant attacks. Did I have any ideas?


I suggested some spyware cleanup programs and he went on his way.

A day later he was back. Things were still bad. We found some advertisement software that was on his machine uninvited. Then we ran a spyware program and I saw a number of names that made me nervous. As we talked, I asked what virus protection software he ran. Norton? AVG? McAfee? He didn't know. "Beth takes care of that stuff normally," he said. She is due to give birth any day. Lately she hasn't had the energy to deal with the computer, so he was trying to fix things. But certainly the computer came with virus software.

We searched for it.

No Norton. No McAfee. No AVG. No nothing.

Bummer.

We downloaded AVG. It's free. It's good. We started a scan.

Quickly AVG found 1, 2, 3 viruses. Ah, hah. We waited a bit more chatting. Suddenly, it started finding more. 25. 100. 500. 1000! The count was over 2000 infected files when I hit the pause button and looked at Moses. Wow. I looked at the location of the files and, except for the first three, they were all in the same folder. I didn't want to sit watching for hours, so I went directly to that folder. I've never seen anything like it. It was jammed with 16,000 copies of the virus. At 200 Kb each, we were threatening to fill up his hard drive soon!


We deleted a few files, needless to say, and set the antivirus software back to work.

Moses reports that all is well.

Oh, except that two nights back the power supply died and the computer won't even turn on!

I've got to get my buddy a staff and robe.


// posted by Tad @ 5:42 PM
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