I am feeling about as stupid as they get right now, I committed the cardinal sin of computing and did not use it responsibly and I’ve paid dearly for it. I’ve only had this happed once before, but this time was just plain stupidity on my part. You see, I have a gaming computer that I also use to surf sites that our government may consider subversive, so it’s setup to use a special configuration with a proxy to access the internet without leaving tracks.

Safe Computing demands that one take prudent precautions to prevent getting infected by some internet venereal disease and run an anti-virus program. Well, I have always been one to run an AV program and it’s usually the first program installed on a PC after Windows and before connecting to the internet. But for some STUPID reason, when my AV program started having issues starting, I friggen IGNORED it! Fatal mistake.

I managed to get infected with what I later identified as the Win32: Tenga.b virus. This nasty little bastard tags every EXE file on the computer it’s infected then starts to work on network share mappings. I managed to catch this horrifying beast before it infected any OS files on my other 2 PCs, but the damage was done. Every EXE on my gaming rig was tainted, a simple search of all EXE files on the hard drive revealed they all had a current date starting from the point the virus activated to when I killed it about 40 minutes later. This was about 3pm and by 9pm I had given up hope that a program out there could recover my system as things only went downhill as I tried to repair the damage. I was up until 6 the next morning trying to get Windows installed correctly.

The good news is it only affected EXE files and ALL my data was fine. My practice of only installing OS related software on the C: drive, data on a D: partition and applications on an E: drive saved me a ton of hassle as I was basically able to reformat C: and install Windows and get access to my other drives. I was still unable to clean any EXE files so I deleted them all from the other hard drives. This meant reinstalling ALL my games and programs, but my data is safe and that’s more important.

I’m in the middle of backing up the freshly installed machine now in hopes a restore will be faster in the future. It’s been a good ten years since I last had a problem like this and I would think I would have learned, but as usual, we all become complacent at some point and that’s when your immediately bitten in the ass.

Fortunately it’s only the gaming rig and anything of value is store on my server, it’s just gonna be a pain in the butt getting windows all tweaked back up, not to mention all the software I’ll need to re-download and install. You see, the little snot managed to crawl into my download folders and corrupted any installs ending in exe. The one time that the deadful MSI files are actually safer, go figure.

Meh!
Skunky