It started out as a nice day. I just got home from eating out with my wife. We had a very pleasant time and decided to take in a movie. It seems that every time we try and catch a movie lately we never make it and today was no exception. It was about 1:15 PM when we finished eating but we found that none of the good movies started until 3:00 PM. Oh well, what can you do? I never liked going to the movies on Sunday afternoon anyway. Little did I know that this would be the start of the day from hell.

I had just finished four days of transferring data from my old computer to my new one. It took that long to get everything just the way I wanted it and I was quite happy. I decided to check my email. I consider myself pretty computer savvy. I have been dealing with computers since 1971 when I took courses on them in college. One of the things about running a successful web site is that you are getting sent viruses from everywhere. It seems that there are certain people, or should I say animals, out there that are bent on causing misery for others. These individuals are very proud of their destructive programs and sometimes even include their handles in the software so that other virus authors will know who caused the chaos.

As I said, I thought that I was pretty savvy. when it came to viruses. My machine is protected by a very good anti virus program along with one of the best trojan blockers on the market. My old machine ran for years and was never infected because my software always detected these threats and alerted me and moved them to an area with they became harmless. When I was alerted I merely deleted them. The key was not to EVER open an email attachment from an unknown source or one from a know source before it was scanned. Another very important thing was to remember NEVER to click on any links in email. This was the creed that I lived by for years.

Well folks, I got fooled. Here I was, someone with more computer experience than most people on the planet and yet, I foolishly did what I swore I would never do. I received an electronic postcard in the mail. I think you all know what they are, but just in case I will review it. They are usually sent by a message that states that someone has sent you a postcard and that you should click on a link to read it. When I saw this email, I said to myself this is probably a virus. The problem was that the names it referred to in the email were people that I could have known. I looked at the email and agonized over it. I even went so far as to check the site it came from and it was legitimate. I thought about opening it for awhile and decided that it was someone I knew and I didn't want to hurt their feelings by not opening their mail. What was the worst that could happen, a virus would be caught by my anti virus program and I would delete it as I have done for years.

I clicked on the message and instantly my virus program put up a graphic stating that I had the Win32.parite Virus. I said to myself, boy they got you, you should have known better. Then the unthinkable happened, I deleted an infected file without thinking and it turned out to be a system file. I hadn't realized that the virus had changed the name. The next thing that happened was a message from my anti virus program that there was no way to fix these files because this type of virus infects all your .exe and .scr files. It doesn't destroy them, it attaches to them. Exe files are your program files. As if this wasn't enough, it not only spreads to all drives on your system but spreads through your network, if you have shared resources. I was facing reformatting my hard drive and starting over, this after just spending all those days setting up the new computer. I tried finding a program that would fix the problem. I discovered a couple but they didn't work as advertised and since I didn't know what system program had been erased I was stuck.

Last night I reformatted my hard drive. You are looking at an article that was composed on a computer with hardly any software on it yet. Can you imagine if a virus like this gets into a company's system? It could cause millions of dollars worth of damage. I can not figure, for the life of me, how this is fun for someone. These must be the same type of people that enjoyed pulling the legs off insects or setting cats on fire. There should be a special punishment for people like this when they are caught. It should consist of extremely hard labor at a meaningless task for at least ten years.

The worst part of this whole thing, even worse than getting the virus, is that I feel like a fool. I have learned a lesson, however how hard, and that is I will NEVER AGAIN click on any link in an email, even from people I know. I am also very disappointed to find that there are viruses out there that even my protection can not handle. All these years I had faith in the way I had set up the computer. I am behind a sturdy firewall with what I thought was the best protection available for killing viruses and trojans and now I feel very vulnerable. It is not a good feeling, believe me.

It looks like I will be very busy again rebuilding my software, just what I needed. Well it could have been worse, after all it was only a computer virus. Oh I forgot to mention that I hadn't backed up anything yet because I was just finishing up the computer and was going to backup my files this week. Ironic isn't it?