- Joined
- 29 May 2002
- Messages
- 820
i'm an idiot.
this morning i was over at neowin.net reading a post about an msn issue. there was a link, and i followed it. some site popped up and i saw a link to a screenshot of some program that supposidly allows someone to hack msn accounts.. by what means i have no idea. so i downloaded this program.
2 exe files. commander.exe and controller.exe i believe...
before running anything i did a quick virus scan with avg. because lets face it... i was suspicious. nothing came up, so i ran commander.exe.
within seconds, all my desktop icons vanished.
the windows file protection window popped up telling me to insert my windows xp cd to restore files that had been damaged. ok so now i was scared. i didnt have my winxp cd around. so i shutdown. rebooted and got an error on booting... hal.dll was missing, please reinstall. not im $hiting myself.
i insert my ghost recovery cd...tried to rescue my documents, email and other things i would usually grab during a backup... and i copied the folders over to my external hdd. I noticed something wierd...none of the folders had files in them. my documents with exception to a few temp files was empty. my flashfxp folder and serv-u folders were also empty except for files that run with my system all the time.. ieflash.dll and the tray monitor.
i suppose whatever this file was literally deleted everything it could off of my C drive.
this has got to be the most ironic thing ever. im an advocate of ..smart computing. i never open questionable files, i have a firewall, antivirus, spyware stuff... for whatever reason.. maybe i was still a little drunk from the night before, i was feeling awfully mischievious this morning.
thank god for ghost. i reimaged and was back up in 5 minutes... only hassle being i lost all my new emails, contacts and some documents.
to conclude... dont let this happen to you! i now store outlook email on a separate drive...
this morning i was over at neowin.net reading a post about an msn issue. there was a link, and i followed it. some site popped up and i saw a link to a screenshot of some program that supposidly allows someone to hack msn accounts.. by what means i have no idea. so i downloaded this program.
2 exe files. commander.exe and controller.exe i believe...
before running anything i did a quick virus scan with avg. because lets face it... i was suspicious. nothing came up, so i ran commander.exe.
within seconds, all my desktop icons vanished.
the windows file protection window popped up telling me to insert my windows xp cd to restore files that had been damaged. ok so now i was scared. i didnt have my winxp cd around. so i shutdown. rebooted and got an error on booting... hal.dll was missing, please reinstall. not im $hiting myself.
i insert my ghost recovery cd...tried to rescue my documents, email and other things i would usually grab during a backup... and i copied the folders over to my external hdd. I noticed something wierd...none of the folders had files in them. my documents with exception to a few temp files was empty. my flashfxp folder and serv-u folders were also empty except for files that run with my system all the time.. ieflash.dll and the tray monitor.
i suppose whatever this file was literally deleted everything it could off of my C drive.
this has got to be the most ironic thing ever. im an advocate of ..smart computing. i never open questionable files, i have a firewall, antivirus, spyware stuff... for whatever reason.. maybe i was still a little drunk from the night before, i was feeling awfully mischievious this morning.
thank god for ghost. i reimaged and was back up in 5 minutes... only hassle being i lost all my new emails, contacts and some documents.
to conclude... dont let this happen to you! i now store outlook email on a separate drive...