Now that is extremely annoying not to say embarrassing
It would seem I am spamming people maybe even sending out phishing emails and all this is very annoying. There is that sinking feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you start to get responses to emails you never sent and some of the ex IT people I worked with start to suggest you might be infected. Damn, damn, damn. You wonder if the filtering on other peoples email will protect them or that they will have the good sense to not try the innocuous links in the emails but if people trust you then there is a chance that some innocents will and could start the chain again.
Not that I paint myself whiter than white only that I am naturally careful about these things. I have the strongest antivirus stuff and religiously keep it up to date. I avoid dodgy sites and even have Norton check sites and let me know if they are suspect. I don’t save my passwords I always key them in each and every time. I don’t use my email id for every site I log onto I have various different ones for different places. My virus scanning is on constantly and I run a full scan every week Not sure what more I could really do maybe it is a case of “S**t happens” but more likely that it is my fault an accidental click is all that is needed and there that little piece of code which silently attached itself springs into action and soon everyone in your mailing list is getting a little message saying “hi” from you.
Damn, damn, damn it’s too late now and you just have to live with it. Rescan the Pc (680,812 files) delete all of you cookies, history and anything else you can think of. Respond to anyone who lets you know and apologize and hope you have not started off a global chain which will soon sweep the world and bring it to a standstill.
You get somewhat blasé after a while and it was normal for me to leave my email open all day whilst I am online which may be a key. Not sure about that but think I will only use email on its own and be even more selective about the sites I use. I actually think it was the local Russian Expat site as the email went out early in the morning and it’s either that or the BBC Sports page (which I very much doubt) as these were the only places I had visited. So probably drop the Expat site which I have never been too fond of as there are many people on these moaning about stuff which is irritating so no real loss. Not sure I could survive for long without the BBC as it is my link to the rest of the world.
Damn, damn, damn. You want to trust you Pc and not have to spend your time worrying about this sort of stuff I have lots to do and much of it on the machine so it will be a rough couple of days checking and rechecking that everything is back to normal. In reality it may not be that big a deal but it is never the less embarrassing and that hurts (a great deal). You don’t want people worrying when they get an email from you, you want them to trust you and believe you would not put them in harm’s way.
This sort of thing is not new and in my time I have had exposure to lots of people with this issue just it was never me. Whilst I was running help desks you could get 10 -20 a day in the late ninety’s as that was the age of spam and it was there every day and you spent a great deal of time dealing with it and pacifying people and repairing bits of kit. Some even required changing a person’s name. With the advent of some laws this calmed down and phishing took over as the threat. Now we also have to contend with service threats which try and swamp sites with requests to bring them to a standstill.
Maybe this is the most worrying threat, we live by the Pc these days and not having it whilst it won’t stop the world it could severely impact every day actions. Just think of what you do online besides email and Facebook, shopping, banking, organizing holidays, etc, etc and how you would cope if these were not available just when you needed them.
Damn, damn, damn.