Malware

If I could get hold of the hacker who made the malware that infected my *NEW* computer, we'd have one less hacker to worry about.  All I did (and I'm not sure the family believes me) was run a Google search for FAQ for an certain HP freeware program.  When I clicked on the fourth one on the list, BAM I had hundreds of pop-ups, some had music some had AVIs and none of them could be closed.  I hit the OFF button, but when I restarted it picked up where it left off.  In addition it swapped the search default to Explorer (I use Firefox).  My son spent hours laboriously removing programs one by one, but still all the programs just installed the day before were non-functional, except for the one that hijacked Firefox. Our final attempt was to run a program called MalwareBytes.  It found 1200 incursions and finally, yesterday, my son reformatted the hard drive and  loaded all those programs back again.  MalmareBytes is up and running and finds one or two spywares or adwares every time I run Firefox. 

I have trouble grasping the spitefulness that would create this for no better reason than because they could.  I'm not a valuable target, or even an interesting one as far as I can see.  I only hope that changing all my passwords (and what fun that is) will limit what new damage could be done.

I'm off for now, hope all of you are doing well, and I will be in a better place (mentally) then.

Tshirt for the day:  "I'm not a pessimist; I'm an optimist with experience."