My secretary recently walked into my office and asked with some trepidation, “Did you send me an e-card?” When I told her I hadn’t, she confessed, “I thought it was from you and I clicked on it and…” I walked to her computer, saw the screen and knew we had a virus. The message indicated that if we purchased some new software the virus could be cleaned.
I’m familiar with these scams and figured I could just delete the message, run an alternate virus scanner and clear her computer. My virus scanner automatically updates the definitions every day. I confirmed that it was working, disconnected her computer from the office network, grabbed a pad of paper to write down all the text on the screen and started a full scan. But the virus scanner wouldn’t work. I ran an alternate virus scanner program, but that didn’t remove the virus either.
Next, I rebooted the machine, thinking that starting in Safe Mode might let me get behind the virus. I thought I was getting close until an error message popped up stating that a fatal error had occurred and the computer would automatically shut down in 60 seconds.
Three hours later, I called in a professional colleague for assistance. First, we had to address the fatal error which shut down the computer 60 seconds after it appeared. “Shutdown/a” took care of that. Now that we could keep the machine running we ran a virus scanner from a CD. To our amazement, none of the tools worked.
At this point I had to make a decision. Was it worth it to keep trying? In this case, the machine was old and should have been replaced last year. I decided to cut my losses and headed to the local store for a new computer….