Hit By a Trojan or Two. Is Your Computer Safe? Are You Sure?

For the past couple of weeks, things haven't been normal for me.  I rearranged my office (a Spring Cleaning sort of thing) and with that, decided that I wasn't putting my netbook to good use.  After all, it's powerful.  It's pretty.

Still, I rarely used it.  

A geek friend explained to me that netbooks actually should last longer than laptops because heat doesn't mess with them as much.  Plus, I had an extra monitor I could stick on that baby and have another writing spot. 

Powered up the netbook, and voila.  An evildoer invaded my life.  

At first, I didn't know it.  However, as I added the netbook to my antivirus account, things began to happen.  Bad things.  Slowly but surely, the malware gutted program files so only shells were left, including programs like Chrome and Firefox and IE that allowed me to access the internet. 

The antivirus folk were no help.  Well, some help.  They got their software installed enough that it flashed a warning about discovering a trojan on the machine before the antivirus got blasted by the malware.

Finally, the Geeks got my netbook and after 7 hours of cleaning up things, they got the bad juju off the netbook and I finally had the weekend to reinstall all my software on the netbook ....

Scary part?  I had installed my cloud connection on the netbook - had they read my files?  I use online banking for some stuff.  Could they gain access somehow? 

Geeks have assured me that nope, no identity theft here.  Still, I've changed all my passwords and I'm monitoring my accounts for anything fishy.  I've disabled Java, done some other stuff too. 

So, if you're reading this post then stop right now and make sure that you've got your computer protected, and that you've got the latest updates downloaded for your security software.  

Because the other thing the Geeks told me was that there's a lot of bad stuff happening right now - lots of attacks like this, with others not escaping exposure like I did.   Don't know why there isn't more media coverage about this, but the Geeks would know about this upsurge and they're serious about evildoing computer attacks on the rise right now.