I recently wrote an article "Use This Formula To Have



Pleasurable And Safe Internet Access" for Home Business and

Small Business owners about protecting yourself from the

bad guys on the internet who are trying to steal your

identity, steal your passwords, break into your accounts or

just plain screw up your computer. Generally, I have been

pretty proud about going several years at a time without

getting a virus. Well, guess what? I got bit yesterday by a

Trojan Horse.

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 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.