I don't know who to put on this Shit List for the episode below other than myself.

I have learned a ton-load of information on this forum and I have prided myself on keeping my computer as clean as it can be. I have visited some pretty strange places and, by acting with due caution, the closest I ever came to being invaded by spyware or a virus was being stuffed with a cookie. CCleaner kept that up to snuff, too.

Well, I was doing a White Hat project. A small one to get my feet wet. It was based on a keyword that had about 250 searches a day, about 2,500 sites only, and reasonably high-priced products. Looked like a no-brainer. So off I went to analyze some of the sites that use this phrase.

Some of them were cool, but one (a blog) looked like nothing but a keyword list with each keyword being an anchor text. There was some decoration, but it was sparse. I found my phrase and clicked. Up popped a new screen offering to show a video about the phrase.

The way it was laid out looked kinda weird. It looked like a frame within a frame or something odd like that. Still, who cares? I was doing White Hat stuff, right? Nothing could happen to me, right? I knew my shit, right? I was a badass who hung out on Black Hat World, right? I DIDN'T NEED TO THINK, RIGHT?

So I clicked on the video to download it (duh!) and all hell broke loose.

Fuck me!

I got a face-full of trojans and viruses like I have never seen. One of them disabled my task manager and installed a so-called XP antispyware that started grinding and grinding, except you couldn't turn it off. It was obviously sending shit from my hard disk out to the net, so I pulled the plug on the Internet connection after about a minute of trying to find a way to turn the program off. That was the only smart thing I did up to that point.

I will not bore you with the gory details except to say that I took almost 3 days in hell of only doing that to kill well over a hundred trojans (including some really nasty ones) and viruses. The only virus I kinda hated to see go was a rather benign one that had a bunch of virtual cockroaches crawling all over my screen and taking bites (with resulting chunks missing) out of icons and task bars.

I zapped all those trojans and viruses, though, every stinking one of them. But what a mess.

I use Firefox, not Internet Explorer. But IE has to be present on the computer, otherwise some Microsoft things don't work well. And even though I was using Firefox, well over half of my woes came from installing themselves in IE, especially some damn Active X controls that installed themselves automatically when I wasn't looking.

Believe it or not, the latest version of AVG (the free version) got the very last problem. After going through several programs—cleanup, antivirus, anti-spyware, registry cleaners, etc., even some manual deletes—there was still one nagging sumbitch that popped-up legitimate IExplorer and DrWatson messages (but for the wrong reasons) and jammed the computer if you fiddled with them, so I couldn't kill them or turn them off. I had been using AVG version 7.5 and upgraded to 8 just to see if that would do anything. Surprise, surprise, it got the last little fucker. Whew!)

Boy was that a lesson learned. Here I am a tuna swimming among sharks and nothing bad has happened. The moment I got out into the open sea with nothing around, I got blindsided by a goddam killer whale.

Fuck me twice!

I am on the shit list with me. It's going to be a while before I let me out of the doghouse.

Next time I will pay fucking attention. No. That's not exact. I will pay fucking attention all the fucking time from fucking now on.