I am responsible for keeping 250 computers up and running every day.

A few years back I had to get really focused on Internet security to deal with rising problems of Viruses, Spyware and Malware affecting my clients.

I went out of my way to educate my clients/users about e-mails with attachments and not clicking yes to suspect browser plug-ins etc.

I have enjoyed a good year without any major problems of that front. Until today.

A user gave his brand new laptop to his spouse to use on the Internet for a short time. Now the laptop is compromised with Malware

The above balloon popup up box is fake by the way, if you see one on your laptop don’t click it.

Well I suppose I get to test my chops battling against it, trying to rescue the PC.

The lesson to learn is, no matter what anti-virus you use or what firewall you are behind. If you have a willing participant (in this case a human) who will click yes, when they really should click no. Bad things are bound to happen.

This was on a fully patched Windows XP Pro SP2 / IE 7 build. Less than a week old.

I suppose I should give a shout out to Windows Vista if this laptop was running it (it wasn’t) things might have not been so bad.