A Malicious Distraction in Everyday Ramblings

This messy busy picture is of the street my apartment faces on a weekday full of cars of working people trying to avoid the high fees to park at the local garages. Without a resident sticker (that one does pay for) they have to come out and move their cars every two hours. That can’t be good for productivity. But it does make for an ever changing streetscape.

There is this report I run every work day that helps me understand what is going on in my little work world and helps identify what we need to do. I use a tool (a software program) that attaches to our big complicated Oracle module that is the focus of my work life.

Last Tuesday I went to run my report and I got an error message saying that a virus had been detected and It wasn’t going to produce the report. I could run it a different less useful way. I let my local powers that be know.

The next day when I was in the office I called our Help Desk just to be sure and we ran a full protection scan that took the rest of the day. Nothing was found so the consensus was that Internet Explorer was being overly protective.

Then on Friday my local contact told me that other people using the tool were also getting the same message.

Yesterday late in the morning (I was working at home) I received an email from a Security Analyst working deep in another area saying that a Malware Trojan Downloader had been detected on my machine. For four days the security scan caught the virus and removed it and for four days it had reappeared.

Eek!

I called the Help Desk as instructed and a curt unsympathetic employee said that I must bring my machine in to have it reimaged. Like now.

But wait a minute there Mister; I am working from home! Sigh.

As soon as I was off the phone I shut down the machine, took it off the docking station. And, umm, went grocery shopping. (It was lunchtime.)

When I got back and had put my groceries away, I grabbed the machine and went down to the office. Our local contact with our computer geeks has sick kids at home and has been telecommuting a lot and I am ever so lucky that he was actually available and in the office.

He had a loaner computer available. Second lucky break. We got some basics configured and I was able to return home and kind of sort of work for the rest of the day.

The loaner has a higher version of Windows and everything is subtly different. I lost all the stuff I had on my desktop, cat sitting instructions, the template for how I keep track of what students owe me for classes that sort of thing, all that will need to be reconstructed. And there are a lot of things that make my job easier including reference sheets and formats.

But at least all the work work was backed up on the Network.

It has all been quite a distraction from the election and all the challenging news coming down the pike.

May your distractions today be much less malicious. :)

Last updated November 07, 2018