Bitten!

Those of us who use Macs are pretty blasé about viruses, I guess. The spam emails and virus emails are annoying, but they can't, for the most part, hurt us, so we just grumble and delete them, but we don't worry about them. I run a virus scan on the Macs I use once a week, but nothing has ever been found. When I hear about a new virus, or when I start getting new virus emails, I usually look it up, and send the information on to the people in my office who use PCs.

So this morning when a client called and said that when you typed their website address into a browser, it redirected to a porn site, I said, wow, that's weird, let me try it. When nothing happened on my Mac, I turned around and typed the URL into the PC that sits on the corner of my desk, because I wanted to see what he was seeing.

I have the PC mostly so I can see what the websites I build look like on a PC environment. I use the Mac almost exclusively, so I've gotten out of the habit of worrying about viruses; in fact, it's been so long since I used a PC to any great extent that I'm pretty sure we didn't have nearly the proliferation of problems that are out there now.

Anyway, I guess you have to be burned at least once before you think twice. Although, in my defense, I could easily have typed that URL into the browser anyway, there would be no reason not to, well, you know, until he told me that it was downloading porn . . . And it frankly never occurred to me that visiting a website address could cause such havoc.

The only thing that happened right away was that I got some kind of security warning asking if I wanted to download a "XXX" toolbar for quick access to porn sites. I thought, hm, I wonder what I should do here? (Just kidding!) I clicked "no," then got up and went over to Eugene's office and asked him if he would take the call, because the guy needed to talk to someone who was more familiar with the way servers and networks work than I am.

By the time I got back to my office, the PC had spawned something like a dozen browser windows, all showing a different porn site. Well, I don't know whether they were different or not, I closed them all as fast as I could and yelled for Eugene, who was off the phone by that time. He thought quicker (and differently) than I did, and went around to the back of the PC and unplugged the network cable. But by that time, of course, it could easily have been too late.

It installed about a half dozen new shortcuts on the desktop, and added a bunch of new shortcuts to the Start menu. Eugene cleaned them all out, except for one--"Free Daily Porn"--which he said he thought might have been one I'd already had . . . (Actually, he said he left that one because he thought it was funny.) They all thought it was pretty funny.

It got really funny when Eugene found the browser history list, full of every kind of porn site imaginable. We were all standing out in the hall talking while he was working on the PC, and he laughed and said, "Do you want me to save your bookmarks?" Very funny.

It also apparently installed something that opens IE at some random time and automatically goes to a porn site. Eugene's only advice at that point was to suggest, "If you're going to have a client meeting in your office or something, use the Mac, and you might just want to turn off the PC monitor, you know, just in case."

So for a couple of hours, we were busy cleaning off my computer. Eugene installed a couple of programs that check your system for spyware and adware (and they found a TON of stuff), and John told me where to download a free virus protection program (I had never checked to see if the PC had anything like that on it, since I hardly use it), and I ran that, and it found several viruses. I think it's okay now. What a fiasco! And all from visiting a very normal website.

As John said this afternoon, what if the people that write those things were actually using that brainpower for good?