Given my extensive technical background I rightly consider myself online-savvy. I did not used to keep an antivirus for I thought that I was smart enough not to get infected. And I almost never register at third party sites so my spam traffic is minimal.

But regardless of how savvy I am, I too fell prey to a couple dirty tricks that the online conmen play. Somebody went as far as to deliberately try to infect my PC by sending me (and responding!) personal emails with an attachment, which I nonetheless did not open. I communicate with a lot of people and the foe sounded like a customer, but the lack of detail and the insistence on opening the attachment with order information kept me safe and sound.

I usually do not download software either, unless it comes from a company or vendor I know. So chances for getting trojans are minimal. But then I got complacent and allowed Media Player to find and download a missing video codec and the ‘fun’ began.

Although Symantec Antivirus cleaned the system it did not eradicate (or event detect) the trojan hideout, which managed to survive even the OS reinstallation. I have installed a new copy of Windows XP on my other hard disk, but could not delete the old installation on the other drive because the flash.ocx file was in use, even when I booted in safe and recovery modes. So I was left no choice but to format the offending partition using low-level BIOS format procedure and fry the bugger. Ever since my system is back to normal and I am no longer downloading codecs no matter where they come from.