I never asked for a Trojan Horse for Christmas

Something I’ve long dreaded came to be a few days ago (which is why I haven’t posted in so long). I got hit with a Trojan Horse Virus. I have great antivirus software and it did catch the attacks (there were so many of them, I lost count) but when it gave me the option to quarantine them the virus had either changed the permissions on the files or renamed them. It all happened in about 3 seconds.

Suddenly I had Internet Explorer windows popping up every few seconds, going to sites like MensHealth, online dating sites and some other sites that I won’t mention here. I couldn’t get anything done with all these windows constantly popping up. Not to mention the fact that my 11-year-old daughter could at any time be walking by and see one of these obnoxious and sometimes truly offensive windows pop up. Of course, I had a publication deadline looming also. I had to fix this now.

I did some searches for the name of the virus that my AV program found. This eventually led me to stumble upon a website that I am so thankful for, the Tech Support Forums. This is a place where you can get free help from a qualified and fully trained computer technician on just about any computer issue…including how to remove viruses.

Getting help there is a matter of finding the right forum for your issue (in my case it was the HijackThis Log Help Forum then reading any sticky topics on how to post and/or what steps to take before posting. That’s really important because how fast you get help may depend on whether or not you follow protocol.

Once you’ve done that, you post your issue with as much detail as possible and include your HijackThis log (if you’ve never had a virus you probably don’t have any idea what that is, but since you may very well have to deal with this at some point it might be a good idea to find out). Then you wait for a technician to respond to your post.

This can be a process that takes several days depending on your issue. The technician will give you step-by-step instructions to follow and has you post certain logs of the results. This continues until your issue is resolved.

Mine took 3 days but it probably would have been only 2 if I had not lost my internet access on day 2. I live in a very remote area and while we do have one internet cafe in town, it’s not open on Sundays. I had to drive 30 minutes to the next town to find one so that I could post my logs and wait for a response. Luckily, our internet was back up by the time I got home and I could continue to work on the problem.

I’ve never dealt with this before and let me tell you, it would have been very easy to freak out completely. Once I found the Tech Support Forum though, I felt a tremendous sense of relief. The technician was very calm and responsive. I knew that he was going to help me solve this problem, and he did.

These are all volunteers, most of them have other jobs. They offer this service completely free, but I certainly made a donation. I could have spent who knows how much hiring someone (and because I live in a remote area it probably would have been a week before they could come out). Plus, this happened over a weekend and these people seem to work 24-7.