Wednesday, April 2, 2008

A PSA from Nic

Loyal Readers: Today I was perusing the cute scrapbook pages on my darling cousin Jen's blog. I decided to leave her a comment - and after posting it - noticed that someone by the name of "Tygogal" had left her one also. All it said was "Click HERE to view comment". Being of a curious nature, I clicked. Guess what I found out?

Tygogal=A secret combination=The Spawn of Satan.

Weird stuff started downloading into my registry. This actually happened to my DH in the summer - he clicked on something from (supposedly) Microsoft -- and the next thing he knew he had downloaded a Trojan Horse virus(it's not really a virus - but it causes tons of problems on your computer and really slows things down).

Anyway, after this happened to DH, he told me if something like that ever happened again, to shut the computer off and unhook the wireless internet link from the wall. Luckily, when I noticed all this crazy stuff- I remembered to flip the switch and shut it down (oops - forgot to unhook the internet though).

Thanks goodness I knew what to do! I thought I was in the clear - but when I rebooted the computer and ran my "Spyware" detector--a ton of naughty spies had downloaded to my registry. We deleted them off - ran another CA Virus detector - and found another doozie.

How did Typogal find Jen? Probably through searches on either google or blogspot. So she and I (proper english?) both went into our blogs under "Customize" then clicked on "Settings". Then scrolled down a bit to "Add blog to our listings" - changed the answer to NO. Scrolled down a little more to "Let search engines find your blog?" And changed that answer to NO.

By the way, this isn't privatizing your blog. Your blog will still be available on the internet - it just won't be listed with the masses - and will hopefully keep SPIES LIKE THEM away.

4 comments:

Beeswax said...

Wow. That's BAD.

Pam said...

Great info Nic. I will have to see what my blog is set at. I hope that you have gotten all the crazies off your computer now. We had a huge virus when we moved here and hooked up our internet. It was so bad that we had to totally gut the computer of everything. I'm talking hard reboot. But I did get a new computer out of it so maybe it wasn't such a bad thing after all. Life without a computer though was tough... how did we ever manage.

Jen said...

you are my computer blog hero!! thanks for saving me/us!!

Heather said...

Hi Nicole, I don't know if you remember me. We were in SR1 with you a while back. That is great info to have, I am going to change my settings too! We had the Trojan Horse virus last year on my home computer and it was bad!