The Virus Six weeks today and while the pregnancy is going well, our week was very disrupted by a computer virus. Or actually a Trojan horse, where somebody tried to install a back door on our computer, we were NOT happy about it! ICQ is one of those programs, which you can use to send messages to, or chat with friends/acquaintances online. It is fun, I have almost daily ICQ contact with a good friend from Canada and more occasionally with other on line friends. I had been ICQing on and off with some Dutch guy, ADAM, who seemed innocent enough. Little immature, but it is always kind of fun to talk to fellow Dutch people, so I didn't care too much about that. Actually he just announced that he was going to be a father for the first time in 6 months, so I was very happy for him and secretly figured that would help him grow up. I told him about my pregnancy and he was suitably impressed about it being our sixth. Like I said, he seemed like a nice guy... So I didn't think anything of it, when he sent me a file, which ICQ showed me as picture.jpg and had the description 'me and my girl friend'. I received the file and then launched it directly from ICQ. Now you have to know that I was a computer science major and always prided myself on not having had any computer viruses yet, because I know how they can be hiding and would never launch a suspicious attachment. No, viruses wouldn't happen to me, only to other people! But I have never worried about jpg files, they can't contain viruses, can they? I mean, as a computer expert, I should know! Wrong! The launching alerted our Zone Alarm program, which is a kind of firewall software we have running, and it asked whether I wanted to use xxxx as a server. What the heck???? Jpg as a server? Alarm bells started ringing and I immediately pressed the 'NO!!!' button. I started up my Windows Explorer, looked at the file that way and it turned out to be an executable! The name turned out to be 'picture.jpg           .exe' and because of the white space in the name, ICQ had conveniently forgotten to tell me about the .exe part! I sent a message to ADAM, telling him this picture was in an exe file, that I didn't do exe files and whether he could send it to me normally. He told me it was just a viewer to go with the picture and didn't I trust him? I replied that I really didn't open exe files like that and he could send it to me without the viewer. Never heard back from him since then. I figured he was just offended I didn't want to run his .exe file, while he was such a trustable guy and still didn't realize what a mess the exe had made on our computer already when I launched it from ICQ. Then at night, my husband, Sander, came home, and I shared what happened. He is a computer expert too, but much more suspicious of nature than I am and he started looking around in our registry and our startup folder. What a mess! This innocent 'viewer' had installed two exe files in our Windows directory and at least 3 links to them in our startup folder. Not only that, but when he turned off the startup links, they turned themselves on again when rebooting. This was not good! Renaming the executables in our Windows directory to non-executables did not solve the problem either. It actually made it worse, because our computer turned out to be reconfigured that they would be needed to run any executable. So now we couldn't run anything any more and we were NOT going to reinstall the virus files! Sander recognized it as a Trojan horse program, where somebody tries to get control over your computer, and that's why it was asking to act as a server. I am still beating myself up that I let this happen to us, even although I know that the file looked totally innocent. At least I have learned my lesson, I will not launch any files directly from ICQ anymore! Of course, we both know the extreme importance of backing up our computers. We both have had our share of crashes and losing data, so we surely should have a fresh back up, shouldn't we? Well, we had been lulled into a false sense of safety, not having experienced major problems or crashes for a long while. And it turned out, our latest backup was at least a few weeks old and not even a full backup. Oops! We ended up buying a new hard disk and doing a clean install of everything, including a linux partition. Then Sander copied everything we still wanted from the old disk to the linux partition before sending it over to the Dos part. We got everything working again that way, although we decided to download a new ICQ program, just to be sure that this virus had not infected the program. We also run TWO virus scanners now, we used to have an old one running, but now we have two current ones! Paranoid? Maybe :-) Still shudder when I think of how much more damage this virus could have done, if it had started deleting stuff like my recent writings and the latest pictures of my pregnancy and my other kids. Not to mention all the email congratulations we got for this pregnancy, I would have been really sad to lose them! Backups suddenly seem a lot more important to us again! Now some more things related more directly to this pregnancy. We told the other kids this week. Imagine us sitting at the dinner table and I announce that we are going to have another baby. Tim, 6yo, asks us whether we are going to have that baby today? You would expect that after three younger siblings, he would realize that it does take a while for a baby to grow and develop :-) Tara, 3yo, enthusiastically exclaims: 'In the swimming pool?' We had our last two babies in a kiddie pool and she attended one of those births and really enjoyed the part where I was in the pool and the baby came out. She is thoroughly looking forward to seeing another baby born that way. Cees, 8yo, was silent and thoughtful for a while. Then he stated, in a worried voice. 'But mama, then we will have six kids and we have only three computers. Do you think that would be enough?' LOL Jane and Kate aren't verbal enough to state any reactions to this news, so they just continued eating and seemed oblivious to the whole thing. Although Jane usually picks up a lot without her seeming to, so I think she might realize something too, but it is hard to tell. In the past, Tim has expressed worries about the whole family fitting in our car when we have a new baby, but he hasn't stated those worries recently any more. The pregnancy itself is going great, still no major nausea, just some slight queasy feelings. Maybe this pregnancy I won't be hit by morning sickness? I can hope, can't I? I am pretty tired though, feels like the first trimester exhaustion is definitely upon me. The worst thing has been my hay fever. We had some wonderful days, nice, hot, almost like summer and the pollen were very bad and made me extremely miserable! I am almost glad it started raining again! :-) Page design by mabear | Send email to Karen | Page last updated: Dec 29, 2001