Caught out by a virus!

Ok, look, I'm a sensible person, right? I never click on links in emails, never even look at popup ads, would never in a million years be fooled by phishing emails. Right?

Er - wrong. Ooops. But it's worth admitting that I'm not so clever as I think I am, if it stops anyone else doing what I did.

Basically I must have clicked on something (although I don't know what) which activated what is known as "rogue security software". There is a detailed description of it here
Rogue security software - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
but briefly, it makes you think that you have a virus and that it is scanning for corrupted files. What it is actually doing is causing the problems you think it is solving, and you can't get rid of them unless you pay up.

Luckily I did come to my senses and shut my computer down, and took it round to my local computer repair place where they cleaned up the mess for me and got it all up and running again.

So I am admitting my stupidity for the greater good! Be warned!
 
Thanks for the warning. It is not stupid the techniques used nowadays are very sly and quite shocking.
I dont think anyone, no matter how careful they are is free of the risk in the current cyber society.
 
if it helps i got caught out too. im the same as you dont open suspicious emails websites pop ups ect thought i was so careful, but no i still got caught TWICE first sounded similar to yours and luckily the mcafee picked it up and deleted it for me. the second was worse dont know what it did but it completely shut down my laptop and spread to my hubbys laptop through out wifi. i didnt even know this was possible. this second virius even killed my mcafee software so couldnt use it. luckliy hubby had a mate that knew how to fix the laptops and was a great help. to this day i dont know how it was possible as i didnt do anything stupid.
 
Since this happened, and I have been warning friends about it, I have heard a lot of "oh yes, me too" stories. And we all thought we were too cautious to get caught out.

Trouble is, as clever as we are, there is always someone out there more clever and more devious!!

Then of course one realises that so much of our lives are dependent on our computers and we are quite lost without them. And we ought to do backups much more often!!! Not that I lost anything this time, but I was lucky.

What I have also decided to do is to use a memory stick to make a regular backup of a few essential files. Any presentations that I happen to be working on at the moment, the membership list of an organisation I am secretary for, etc. The day before all this happened, I gave a talk and the powerpoint presentation and the script were all on my computer! In future when I am preparing for a talk, all the work will get updated regularly onto a memory stick, so I can use it on another computer if something goes wrong.
 
I'm a web developer who is more than aware of what virus's are lurking and how to prevent them. I've still been caught out twice by virus's (luckily i can clean the damage up myself) and had my paypal account hacked (yes they took £1k which luckly my bank managed to pull back from a "school in lebanon"), they lurk in places you don't even realise nowadays, you could have been on some genuine website, there server was hacked or maliciously targetted by a member of there staff to innocently place a virus on your computer when you entered the website you may have been on hundreds of times before. So i'm sure it wasnt a case of stupidity that caused your virus attack
 
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