Night of the living dead

Got your own spyware horror story?

I have operated various computers and Windows versions and surfed the Net without ever actually using an antivirus program for 11 years. Well, yesterday morning my luck ran out and it all caught up with me. Last week I downloaded and used a file-sharing program on my computer for the first time. It seemed great at first, but looking back I think one of those "dead" programs that I downloaded with it wasn't actually dead at all.

My wife woke me up yesterday morning and told me she had to restart the computer. An ad had popped up that said, "A major virus could be on your computer, download from us and we'll fix it..." Being familiar with pop-ups, I didn't think much of it, until four hours later when I went to use my computer.

There were 47 Internet Explorer windows open and something was trying to open more. My system was almost at a standstill. Even a simple click of the mouse took two minutes to process. I disabled and deleted the P2P application, but the offending program kept trying to restart every few seconds. All the icons on my desktop were selected, and I couldn't do a darn thing about it.

Safe Mode had no effect on the selected shortcuts or pop-ups. I tried deleting all my nonsystem-critical software, but to no effect. My system resources were maxed out almost instantly, and something was hijacking Internet Explorer. Every time I tried to visit a Web site for antivirus software, I was redirected and treated to 20 more windows of adware.

Out of options, I rebooted and reinstalled Windows XP Professional. After everything was up and running again, I maxed out the security and firewall settings in Windows, then downloaded a reputable antivirus program and ran it. I was amazed what it found afterwards--a virus that didn't care about operating in stealth, because it didn't have to. In only a few hours, it had infected almost every resource in my computer.

The antivirus program I downloaded ended up finding (and deleting) 5,706 infected files from my hard drive. A Trojan horse had infected my system and sent at least 17MB of information back over the Internet. Luckily, I have never used this computer to process any financial or sensitive information. Still, I was amazed how fast the virus tore through my computer and disabled it to the point of no return, without showing any mercy whatsoever.

Needless to say, I've now installed more security updates, firewall protection, pop-up blocking, and antivirus enabling in the last day than I have ever done in an entire decade. Believe me, from this point forward, I will never run my computer without this kind of protection. I even bought an extra 256MB of memory in anticipation of handling the extra load of the active filtering and virus-protection software, so I wouldn't tax my system resources.

I always thought novice users were the only ones who clicked on obviously fake ads, and if they downloaded a virus, it was probably their own fault. I thought that if they did, it would probably operate silently and they would never find out until someone else was buying lap dances with their stolen credit card information. Well, it turns out I was the naive one. Those 11 years of arrogant Web use came back to bite me in the butt and destroy almost every file on my computer. Never again will I take that chance!

-Patrick
Monroe, Michigan, U.S.A.

Reply from the Download.com editors:

We feel for you, Patrick. What a nightmare! It may be that after 11 years this is the first spyware attack you've noticed, but we're willing to bet that at least some of those nearly 6,000 malicious files your spyware cleaner pulled up were the result of unprotected surfing. These days, it takes only a few minutes of unprotected network time to attract all sorts of malware. The lack of financial data likely saved you from the worst kinds of trouble, but we're amazed you managed to hold out for so long.

Since you've been soul-searching in earnest and mending your wanton ways, we'll put away our wagging finger for now. You've clearly learned your lesson about Net security, and it seems that you now appreciate the importance of security and antispyware software. Keep checking up on the latest tips and updates in our Security Center to stay on the straight and narrow path.