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I didn't get it in an email. I got it surfing the net for information about firewalls. I had done a Google search for "best firewall" and was reading highly placed sites. When I opened one, I noticed that it was trying to download a file. I thought I had told it to not download and thought I was successful but about three or four minutes later my Norton Antivirus software told me that I had the Downloader.Trojan. No kidding, I got a Trojan Horse while looking at a Google ranked firewall site! My antivirus program told me that it couldn't repair it and then a couple of minutes later, it told me that it had repaired the virus. I looked at what it said about the Downloader.Trojan and saw that another Trojan had piggybacked with it. The damage had already been done. My email stopped working. At first, I thought that my ISP's email server or one of their routers wasn't working so I waited a few minutes and when it didn't come back I used the online help desk of my ISP to ask if there was a problem with their email. The help desk guy said that he wasn't aware of any problems. He then asked me if I had a firewall and asked me to turn it off. My thought was "Here we go again " They go through a long routine of check-offs that take too many minutes and it almost always ends up with the ISP having an outage and nobody telling the help desk about it. I turned off my firewall and my email started working. I thought that it was a typical coincidence and that the network had come back up again. I thanked him and said goodbye. Just to test, I turned on my firewall and, oops, my email quit working. I tested a couple of more times and got that sinking feeling. I had gotten a Trojan Horse and it had done damage. I have the Norton Internet Security package. Norton is a division of Symantec. The NIS package is a combined firewall and antivirus system. One of the nice things about it is a link to the Symantec Security Response Center where they take you step by step how to remove a virus if your Norton Antivirus Software hasn't repaired the problem. The first thing they tell you to do is to turn off your Windows XP restore function - a good idea if you don't want to have the virus saved off and reinstall itself later. Another is to put your computer in "safe mode" and rerun your antivirus software. They also tell you how and where to look in your system registry to remove the virus if it is lurking there. Because I ran the Norton Antivirus software in safe mode it took several hours to complete. After everything was done, I rechecked and the nasty little thing was gone. I was prepared for my email to not work when I put my computer back into normal mode. I figured that the Trojan had probably attacked my firewall and it had. The solution was straight forward. I uninstalled and reinstalled my NIS and my email worked again. I came out of this with several take-aways: 1. Even surfing what you think are safe locations isn't always safe. 2. I'm really glad that I have the Norton Internet Security system. If I didn't, I'd probably have some major problems like being a launching pad for some spam company or worse. 3. Even when you are well protected, as I am, you can still get into trouble. 4. Even when you have a good program like NIS, fixing the problem isn't always painless. As I said in my previous article, its highly important to have a good firewall and antivirus system. There is a constant attack going on against computers on the internet and the attackers could put you out of business.
Article Source: http://www.bharatbhasha.net Article Url: http://www.bharatbhasha.net/home_business.php/33725
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