Let me tell you a story that happened to me. I received an e-mail from what looked like our corporate office at work. The e-mail came in a very similar format to the ones that are actually from the company, "name@companyname.com" the e-mail contained a form and the message that as we approach the new year, we need to update some information, and that everyone who drives their own vehicle, needed to have this form on file for tax purposes so as to get reimbursed for our truck allowance each month. Once we completed the form we could just sign a new copy each year, and corp would keep it on file. simple and easy right!

Wrong, oh so stinking wrong!!! It was not from corporate, but the form was a hidden .exe file that began to attack the file on the computer, and corrupt them in alphabetic order from A to Z!!

Then real problem was it did not act like anything was happening, the form just sat there on the desktop, and when i tried to open it, it said the file format was corrupt. As i was about to send an reply asking for a usable file, i happened to notice that all three of my cloud services were syncing at the same time, skydrive, google and dropbox. Yes i keep redundant copies in three different location for all my bids and proposals. Sure call me anal, but hey i am.

So i open up one of them and notice that the files are changing names, so i immediately tried to open my virus software and attack back, being the proactive beasty i am. To no avail. I them began to disconnect all three cloud services from the computer to break the link, by the time i got this to work, i had lost all files from A to H just that fast. I tried everything to restore them, i tried everything to find the virus, nothing worked it attacked the very heart of my computer safe mode was in effective. Geeeeeeeeez i get mad still thinking about it. About 10 minutes after it happened i get an e-mail from corporate warning that this was not from them, great, the IT guy is on vacation, and it is thursday, so i am screwed till tuesday next week. It required a complete install of the OS, a complete re-install of all software, and a complete melt down on my part.

Now here is the good part! i learnt sumpin' very valuable from this!!!

If you get a virus like this ever on your system and it begins to attack-ak-ak-ak. The first thing to do is reach down and press the hard shut down button on the computer, open in safe mode and do a system restore to a time prior to the virus attack, it only has to be a short time. Then if you have cloud services most of them also have restores, just invoke a restore to the day before, and everything would have been saved. Skydrive for instance has a 72 hour look back feature that allows you to restore within that window. Well guess what i was just outside that by tuesday mid day when i got the it guy on the phone and he told me all this.


Arrrrgggggg! O well so far i have survived it, every once in a while someone calls in and says lets do that job you quoted me on, and i have no record of it, and have to sneak by and re do the take off!!!

HP Win 11 12 gig ram, Mac mini Sonoma with 16 gig of ram, BiaB/RB 2026, Reaper 7, Harrison Mixbus 11 , Presonus Audiobox USB96