Safe Surfing

Dateline Puddingstone Lake, California. Today it was reported that an unprovoked and vicious attack was launched against a computer belonging to Darrell “Mad Murmurer” Brueckner.

The attack took place sometime between October 5th and October 8th. While Mr. Brueckner claims to have a great deal of Internet experience it appears that other family members who, according to Mr. Brueckner: “could not find their backsides with two hands and a photograph to identify it”; have been practicing unsafe surfing without his knowledge.

The problem began to manifest itself when Mr. Brueckner, author of Murmurs From the Porcelain Throne one of many personal blogs inhabiting the Internet, sat down one evening last week to create and entry for his web page. To his dismay he found that the keys on his keyboard were no longer placing the corresponding letter in his document. In fact nothing at all happened when he attempted to type his latest entry.

Following the usual process of elimination Mr. Brueckner uninstalled and than reinstalled his keyboard to noticeable effect. He booted in safe mode and his keyboard still failed to respond. He booted using the last known accurate boot file and the keyboard was remained unresponsive. He installed another keyboard with no better luck. No matter what configuration he tried his keyboard failed to respond.

After two frustrating days of keyboard failure Mr. Brueckner through caution to the wind and resigned himself to reinstalling Windows 2000, his hope was that with a new install the problem would resolve itself.

For one brief shining moment he felt that he had finally resolved the problem. With the reinstallation of Windows complete the keyboard worked perfectly: for a brief moment all was right with the world. Than all hell broke loose. Windows began to reboot itself, not once but over and over again. When Windows stabilized long enough for Mr. Brueckner to log onto the net the speed of his DSL modem was the equivalent of a 28K dial up modem. At the same time the light on the modem was blinking furiously as if it were downloading thousands of pages but nothing was happening.

Mr. Brueckner was able at one point to stabilize his system long enough to allow him to run his virus program. The results to say the least shocked him. After ten years of safe surfing, having never had a system failure due to poor Internet judgment his newest computer was infected.

To Mr. Brueckner’s horror his computer had contracted eight known viruses and one Trojan horse that was intent on spreading its deadly infection across the web. Using all of the anti-virus tools in his arsenal Mr. Brueckner was able to eradicate the invaders from his hard drive.

However, knowing how insidious these little bugs can be he chose to remove his hard drive from the mainstream, replacing it with a new infection free model.
Asked if he had any advice for anyone who might read this article Mr. Brueckner responded with a warning that we might all do well to heed. “When it comes protection our personal computers we must assume that everyone is suspect. If you are not sure if a family member or roommate understands the risks involved in unsafe surfing it is your responsibility to educate them or face the same consequences that befell me.”