Perpetual Ruminations

Tuesday

Better get this written now, because I likely won't get this done later. My day did not go according to plan at all. Not that it was a bad day, just not quite as planned.

Rhonda wanted to do some Christmas baking, so we started out with a nice morning of leisure and then did our Bible study. After, she got busy baking and I got busy on the computer. I was using my netbook, and things just did not want to work right. I was using Mozilla, the latest version had just been installed around the first week of December, and it was working fine. Then, it updated and things went awry. No matter what I had open, I would get a message that my flash player was out of date and needed updating.

As far as I know, this was a legitimate warning from Mozilla. But, when I attempted to update my flash player, a whole slew of junk programs and apps began to install on my netbook. I quickly shut down connections to the internet and proceeded to clean things up. Many of the new downloads did not want to uninstall for me. I did manage to get everything removed, and had to also uninstall Mozilla in the process.

Luckily, I have a current and updated antiviral program that blocked most of the harmful files as they downloaded, and quarantined the rest. I assume this was why some of the programs and apps would not uninstall properly, they were missing parts. The bad parts! Even though Bitdefender did its job properly, I still had a big mess to clean up, and once done, I had to run a very in depth and aggressive scan on the machine; a very timely task.

While this is going on, since it's still running and only three-fourths of the way finished, I looked at my laptop. What a surprise to see that there were a few things on here that didn't look right. Again, the files seem to have appeared when I put Mozilla on. Luckily, these had not been accessed and did not install anything -- yet.

Even so, I will be running a very in depth and aggressive scan on here, too. I also looked at Rhonda's computer, and found a few things that needed attention, but her computer had Mozilla in it from quite a while back. I think, if I remember right, it was early last year. It had updated and stayed current, but had not been subject to any of the infections my computers had picked up when I installed the program. I assume it was linked to the download site, not Mozilla, but I don't know for sure.

All I do know is when my netbook tried to update Flash Player, it downloaded a whole gaggle of adware and such. My laptop seems to be clean of any of this, but there are a couple of files that downloaded on the same date. I also know that my Mozilla browser also has been giving the same message about Flash Player. I even checked on here to see which player I have, and what is the newest version, and I am current.

So, just to be safe, Mozilla came off, the files from that day came off, and I reinstalled Chrome. I don't know why it's as slow as it is, but at least it seems safe. Now, the rest of tonight will be used up, computer wise, with an intensive viral scan.