"Hey, Jim sent me an email.  Haven’t heard from that rascal in a while.  I wonder what he means by "You gotta see this!"?  Sounds pretty exciting!  Now, I remember being told not to open any file attachments in EXE or DOC format, but this is a PDF, and no one’s ever said anything bad about them, so I suppose it’ll be okay.  And besides, it’s from my old buddy, so it’s got to be safe."

(Click!)

"We do know that it’s essentially an e-mail based worm that’s propagating that has a link that alleges to be a PDF document that it wants the user to click on," he said. "In reality, it’s a piece of malware that’s obfuscating as a PDF and it has the capabilities to spread virally once it’s installed on your machine."

Oops.

 

And the bad news is, you haven’t even heard the bad news yet.

Most worms these days are ‘smart’, and one of the first things they do is disable your present anti-virus program.

Plus, they’ll keep any additional anti-virus programs from being installed.

Got that?

I’ve now seen this three times over the past six months on others’ machines.  The one I tried to fix rejected my attempts to install both Symantec Anti-Virus and Check Point ZoneAlarm.  Both came up with a "Cannot install" error message partway through the process.

So those days of your thinking, "Oh, I’ll just run a system sweep.  That’ll clear things right up!" are swiftly drawing to a close.  When you finally, eventually open some ‘innocent’ PDF (or picture or video?) and get hit with a ‘smart’ piece of malware, you’re going to have one, and only one, choice to make:

1. Format the hard drive, reinstall Windows, then all of your programs.  If you can’t install Windows yourself, then that’s a week in the shop, $250 for the labor, and an additional $180 if you don’t have a fresh copy of Windows lying around with one of its three ‘activations’ left.
    
2. Spend 5 ugly minutes while the system restores itself cleaning the bathroom as punishment for hurting your poor, innocent computer like that.  With this horrid memory still fresh in your mind, perhaps you’ll be more careful in the future.

That’s really your only choice.  If you’d rather opt for #1, then read no further.  You’re already good to go.

If, however, #2 actually sounds like it might be the better choice, however gruesome it first appears, then I suggest you spend the time reading this site, buy the damn backup program and do it like the pros do.

No, nobody likes cleaning bathrooms.

I didn’t say this would be pretty.