Compromised

It's always wonderful when you start getting texts and emails from your friends telling you the email from your account that you didn't send isn't working. Then when you go to your email account and check your sent messages you see an email from your account that you did not send that contains an odd combination of letters and special characters that looks like a link but doesn't connect to any site. Isn't that great? This email was sent to basically everyone in my contact list, including attending physicians and other doctors I work with. I'm not sure what the email is accomplishing but I am sure it is some kind of hash function or data miner. I am sure it is doing something, even though on the surface it appears to be a dead end.

This is what I get for using Windows. I've been using Windows 7 for the past month or so trying to get some stuff done that I haven't been able to figure out how to do in Ubuntu yet (basically, it's the 2% that I can't do in Ubuntu). I swear security on Windows is a joke. I can't even use that system for a month without it doing something dumb to ruin my computing experience. And what makes this instance particularly bad is that not only is it affecting me, it's affecting everyone on my contact list as well. I don't remember clicking on anything suspicious or going to any web sites out of the ordinary. Regardless, I must have done something stupid at some point to allow this little program into my system. The crappy AVG software found nothing (as usual) but my Ad-Aware found a "highly malignant" trojan that it was able to isolate and remove. That, along with changing my gmail password, hopefully will solve this problem. Otherwise I might have to email Google and ask them to shut off my account.

For now, I am out of Windows and back into the wonderful Linux-based computing environment that provides speed, safety, and reliability. I'm sorry for the inconvienience of the emails. Hopefully no one who opened the email got affected but I am afraid once you click on it it is too late. Hopefully the changes I made solved the problem from my end. Stinky Windows...