Posts tagged Browsing The Internet

This week my computer caught a virus… I must have got it when sharing a USB Drive with a friend and the anti-virus software didn’t pick this up. What prompted me to scan my computer was a notification from my ISP saying that access to the Internet was blocked to due email spam.

Upon investigation, running a netstat -ano showed that there were indeed SMTP (port 25) outbound connections to various IP addresses. I also noticed that browsing the Internet was slow and the system would occasionally reboot by itself (if you have these symptoms I would suggest you look into this further). Rebuilding the OS and then installing an anti-virus software fixed the issue but this was very disruptive. I was almost out of action for the whole day and was unable to do any work. I now have a better understanding of why large corporate businesses are so persistent with ensuring they have the latest security patches and anti-virus definitions – a virus outbreak in any business can impact the day to day operations of the business which means loss in profit and productivity.

There are many anti-virus applications on the market but you can try BitDefender – it also has an online scanner.

Have you been affected by a computer virus in your business?