Saturday 11 June 2011

Virus Warning

Now you guys, I'm sure you're smarter than me. But if you do notice a big spike in your blogger stats, 50 hits a day from someone you follow, don't go and check them out. Otherwise -- kerplammy-- you'll might get  virus fever just like me.

I've nicked Chris' computer to write this, and the lovely people at Dell are trying to sort me out, but I'm still a little feverish.

I don't know where the virus came from, I can't blame Blogger. But there's some funny business going on.  

15 comments:

  1. Sorry for the bad news, Deborah. I have totally noticed a spike in my stats, and you're right - 50+ hits are coming from a single blog I follow. Crap. I hope your computer is okay.

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  2. Yikes! I hope your 'puter gets well soon.

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  3. Weird. I hope your computer recovers.

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  4. I'm sorry to hear about your computer! Hope it recovers soon.

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  5. Thank you for the warning, Deborah. So sorry to hear about your comp. Hope it gets sorted soon.

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  6. I'm not as smart as you. I've noticed a huge increase in page views at my blog. I just thought I was popular. I did click on the offending sites, and so far, nothing bad has happened, thankfully. Any idea what's behind it, or if anyone's doing anything about it?

    Dan

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  7. Thanks everyone. I've got all my data. I've been lucky. It's just been a pain, and an expensive business.

    Len, I'm getting a lot of hits from one site 150 in a week, but they're not reflected in an increase in post views. So it makes sense to me that this might be the virus, knocking at the door. But to be quite honest, I don't know. I can't blame Blogger.

    The virus I got looked liked 'Windows Vista' and told me I had a hardware problem and asked me for credit card details to buy software to solve the problem. It wouldn't let me get into my files. Dell said it was a deadly virus, but they recovered my files and now I've got to re-install.

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  8. Oh yuck. If this ever happens again, unplug your p.c. immediately from the internet, reboot into safe mode, and run ccleaner plus malwarebytes. Once that is done, reboot and run malwarebytes one more time on desktop and whatever was there should be gone.

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  9. Oh my word! I've spiked massively and caused spikes on other people's computers. >_<

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  10. Thanks for the tip. It's scary how these things happen. I had something similar myself recently, despite up-to-date security, firewalls etc. Still don't know how it got in. Fortunately I was able to tidy it all up manually but I dare say a lot of people are tempted to pay.

    And always : back up, back up!

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  11. Thanks Michael,

    And Misha and Simon, I thought that I'd gotten really popular for a while.

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  12. Oh man! Thanks for the warning! Hope you don't suffer too much with it!

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  13. Thanks DU, looks like I'm back to normal now-- touch wood.

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  14. Regardless, Blogger's been acting WEIRD lately. I never know when my list of followers will suddenly vanish only to reappear days later.

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  15. Aw man, you mean I'm not getting more popular? Damn. I did go to the page that had suddenly shot up as the referring site a few days ago, but nothing bad's happened thus far. Perhaps b/c i'm not running Vista and I don't use Internet Explorer. I dropped IE for a browser with more features, but it turns out I also dropped a lot of virus attacks too -- since IE is the most used browser out there, it's the most targeted by malware-makers

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