OK, this all revolves around me doing something stupid, so let me set the stage before I ask my question. I was thinking about renting a movie last night, and since I never did get around to see Tombraider while it was in the theaters, I thought I’d do a quick google search to see if it was out on DVD yet before heading out to pick up a video. The answer is no, but like an idiot I decided to follow a couple cryptically worded links stating that the movie was available for download. “Download?” thinks I, that’s impossible. “I wonder what they are referring to.” Well, I still don’t know, because it appears to have been a trap setup to catch the unwary in hail of popup windows. I couldn’t close them fast enough, nor could a ctr-alt-del my troubles away. No big deal. I hit restart thinking that my unwise curiosity had caused no more harm than a few wasted minutes.
Wrong. I know have a pornographic start page – easily fixed, but how did the web site do that without my permission? I also have about a half dozen bizarre links in my favorites – easily deleted, but again how? Now it gets really strange. Outlook won’t launch due to a corrupt database. Troubleshooting it, I find a bunch of crap with the same wording as the offending links has been surreptitiously dumped there. Now I’m worried. Slightly harder to fix, but more importantly: how did a simple website hack into Outlook, and what else did it do to me? How can I prevent it from happening again?
I have Norton antivirus and Zonealarm installed, up to date, and working properly; but I got no warning. Yeah, I’ve asked several questions, but what I really want to know is: how did this happen, what other problems should I look out for, and how can I safeguard against it in the future?