Close Encounters of the Malware Kind, or: How to Kill your Computer…

Tuesday morning started off like any other Tuesday morning here in N.E. Switzerland. By eight o’clock I was at my desk overlooking the woods, sorting through the new emails, deleting the junk ones, saving those that had to be answered. First on my main email account, then on gmail.
Then I turned my attention to the spam folder. Six emails were here, more than usual. One wasn’t spam so I shifted it to the proper place, and then…

It was Catherine Aird who said: ‘If you can’t be a good example, then you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.’
Last Tuesday morning I managed to be both. Almost simultaneously.

The horrible warning bit first. We all know how to empty the spam folder, right? We use Ctrl A to mark the emails, and then we hit Delete. People, do not ever, under any circumstances whatsoever, do what I did and start deleting them per mouseclick. There I was, half my brain switched off and the other half thinking about something else, click-click-delete, click-click-click – ‘Oh *?*! – that one’s opened, OMG what have I done – quick, quick, delete, delete…’

Too late.

Every last file on my laptop was mashed. Instead of the photo of Maroni on the desktop I had the black screen of death with dozens of weird icons.

The dropbox was mashed too, and so was the memory stick from my camera which I’d left in the pc. Panic ensued. Time to phone my son, a qualified IT technician.

Son 2 was on side immediately. It isn’t every day your mother calls with such an interesting problem at breakfast time. He had a look using one of those remote team programmes, then rolled his sleeves up.

Now for the good example bit. As well as in the dropbox, I have my writing on sticks. Six of them. (Okay, maybe six is a wee bit OTT.) One is backed up every day, another two every couple of days, the rest every week or so. So in the middle of being totally stressed out, I knew I still had my important files.

And of course, mashed files are all in a day’s work to the dropbox support team. As long as you can provide a link to the ‘event’ – I wouldn’t have known where to start with that, but Son 2 was onto it straightaway – they can do a Rollback and return your dropbox set to a time in the past. Huge thanks here to Piper and Dean at Dropbox Support for their excellent work.

So what did I lose?
My photos. Many are also on WordPress, FB, Twitter, or with other people, so they’re not gone forever.
My list of useful websites. Several hundred of those to re-find, if I need them. My list of favourite music on Youtube. My collection of bits and pieces that was only on the desktop of the infected computer.
And most of all, the TIME it’ll take to get things reorganised.

Is the laptop dead? I don’t know. Son 2 says not. We’ll see. For the moment I’m working on my netbook which has a screen the size of a postage stamp, but it’s #allmyownfault.

Never forget: Ctrl A – Delete. You have been warned…

Merken

Merken