Infection!

I stumbled to my computer this morning and powered it on.  The familiar hum of the fans and harddrive and the instant flow of hot air from under the desk reminded me that I need to pick up an air conditioner.  High temperature is not something that I am particularly comfortable with, especially when there's a good dose of humidity.  I would much rather work in a freezer and dress up warm than work in a hot room and feel like I need to peel my skin off!

As the monitor came to life, I plugged my newly acquired iPhone in to sync (synchronize - make sure that what's on the computer matches what's on the iPhone).  Strangely, once iTunes started it began reporting problems.  Not unusual but different.  Immediately I decided to run Spybot (a program to check for malicious programs on the computer).  Whenever I run Spybot (excellent program, by the way), I always check for new updates.  This time, the updates could not be 'found' which is the first time that I've seen that problem.  Something is up, I thought.  I ran the check regardless, and straight away Spybot detected an issue with a piece of spyware called, win32.agent.ieu.  Not good.  I check on Google for this and it looked like I had a serious problem when many of the posts said that Spybot would not be able to remove it.  However, I also noticed that the post were one or two years old and that gave me some hope that the makers of Spybot, Safer Networking Ltd., had figured out a way to deal with this problem.  Eventually the scan completed and the computer appeared to have picked up a mass of problems.  This is very unusual as I keep the machines updated and scan every use.  Thankfully Spybot fixed the issues quickly and a re-scan indicated that all spyware had been removed.  Spybot has a feature that allows you to 'immunize' your computer so that problems that have been dealt with once don't have the ability to return later. 

As I left the computer running for a while before starting a day of work, I felt, for the first time, that the effort of the people at Safer Networking Ltd. really did deserve a donation for their time, effort and expertise.  And so, I will...

Tony