Hi, myspacers. This will be brief, I just want to let you into my world, since it intersects with yours.
Many of you may have heard the stories of hackers getting a clueless internets-er to download something from a trusted source that wrecks their computer and stuff. What bozo'z, right. How could they be so foolish? Count me in among them.
Yesterday, they used Kos to get me to kill my computer. All the myspace details below the fold. All you hacker friendlies if you have any advice I will check comments, although at this time I can't be considered a reliable user until I buy some new software. Right now, I am using someone else's computer (Ok, yes, my mom's).
Yesterday when I signed in to my favorite coffee klatch, there was a header on the page, above the kos polls that said something to the effect:
We have new sponsors, if you are seeing this it means that your adblocker is preventing our sponsors to be seen. Please help us bring the same great level of service by giving our sponsors a view. If you take the following steps you will be able to view this and allow us to continue to bring you the same great content you love.
Now I'm not sure if that is something that normally appears and was coopted, or if it was all black hat original. Either way, I wasn't thinking suspiciously, and if Kos is asking, I'm doing right? So I did what it asked. Immediately all the formatting goes away from the page and turns dKos into word salad. I check Huffpo, Rawstory, ThinkProgress, all the same - no proper formatting. After a little while my spy protection comes up.
It tells me I have a malicious trojan, the type that potentially allows a third party to view the contents of my computer. OMG! Ok, so I do the scan and it tell me that I need to restart my computer to finish the process.
When the restart process is done, instead of back to normal, I get - "Unknown hard drive error" in green letters at the top of a black screen. Thankfully, I still have the manual and was able to manually restart the computer and begin a restoration. At first I thought it was pretty cool because I got fancier icons than I had before - a little upgrade, alright. Not everything is bad.
Then of course I started with the spy sweeper. It has been corrupted. Both of them. The disks won't even read. So I have to go get new protection before I can log back on. Fortunately Norton still works and identified for me the following to problems: one worm and one backdoor.
OMG! So today my partner and I are going to be working on saving our computer and retrieving our important files.
Has anyone ever had this happen to them and if so, do you have any special tips for the best way for me to proceed with saving/protecting my computer?
UPDATE: Well thanks to those who suggest I get a mac. Unfortuantley, that's not a realistic solution for me at this point. But I do appreciate the concern. I'm just gonna see what I can do with getting more powerful software. That is along the lines of the help I was hoping I could get. But maybe I'm dreaming. Anyways, onwards and upwards. There ain't no stopping us now.
UPDATE again: Thanks guys for all the great advice. I love this place. Ok, now time to go out there and get Obama elected.