Big scare

Last week on Friday morning I went to send a quick e-mail before heading to work and that's when it all began. The instant my internet browser was open, before I could do anything, an alert notification appeared informing me that my computer had been compromised by 6 viruses, 2 worms, and over 1200 bits of spyware. About a minute later another window appeared telling me that one of the worms has infiltrated my e-mail and had already sent an infected e-mail to every one of my contacts. I was pretty worried that I was going to receive several hate texts from newly infected people and that all my computer data was lost.
As I did not have much time before I needed to leave for work I promptly set my anti-virus software to work. When I arrived home from work approximately 9 hours later the initial scan was not yet complete. It took 11 1/2 hours to scan my computer to locate all of the aforementioned problems. Once all the problems were located it software took 4 hours to remove the viruses. After over 15 hours of my computer running my anti-virus software was unable to remove 2 of the viruses and one of the worms.

I was at a total loss as to what to do. I computer savvy friend of mine told me it would be in my best interests if I just saved everything I could on an external hard drive and completely re-format my computer. So that is what I did. If you haven't ever done that before, it take about 8 to 10 hours to delete your hard drive and then another hour or two to load all your software and saved files back onto your computer.

So I spent the majority of my Friday and Saturday dealing with computer problems. I guess the bright side is that as far as I know there haven't been any e-mails sent from my accounts to people as a result of the viruses.