It was crafty, cunning Odysseus, you see, who thought up the trick of the wooden horse. You remember that one – how the Greeks built a BIG wooden horse, hid the soldiers inside, pretended to sail off and leave the horse. The Trojans, foolishly ignoring Cassandra, brought the horse INSIDE their walls. Then when no one was watching, all the Greeks came out of the horse and overcame the Trojans, winning what today we call The Trojan War (thank you, Homer). Or maybe I’m mad at Epeius who actually built the horse so that the stratagem worked. Whichever.
I have spent the last SIX days trying to clean up my laptop, which was infected by the Mal/Gbot-A trojan. Not only have *I* been spending my time on this. My plurk friends have helped. My coworkers have helped. Three people have spent more than 2 days at the office trying to track down this sneaky trojan and clear it out once and for all. Gbot-A is VERY good at hiding, looking like something else, not showing up in antispyware scans and cleanups. I do NOT know how I got it. I do NOT open attachments. I swear I wasn’t kissing strange websites. Yesterday I thought we’d actually rooted out the devil. But this morning – all my browsers were hijacked/blocked yet again.
What does Gbot-A do? Hijacks the browsers to a list of buy-sites. For all I know it does more than that, but that was the symptom. Symantec kept warning me of files trying to reach the internet. I’d block those processes, and then my browsers ceased to work. Gbot-A writes new keys to your registry. Modifies existing keys. Adds proxies. It is one nasty Trojan. And to think – I always preferred the Trojans to the Greeks. (Yes, even though Paris was a slimeball. I’ve always been partial to Hector and Cassandra.)
Anyway, I think maybe we finally won the war today. I have the BEST coworkers – patient, determined, giving of their time. For those of you who might want to know more, we found the solution at Sophos. My coworker cleaned up my registry this morning. I’ve rebooted twice since then and my browsers still work. What a relief.
So maybe now I can get back to my regularly scheduled life. Or maybe not. *grin* My wonderful husband gave me a present last night: an iPad!!!! And I love it!!!!
(The photo at top is a link to the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. Click through on the photo to see other related pictures.)
Ahuva's Blog 
Poor Laocoon, even his one claim to fame is overshadowed by the cursed prophetess. In the Epic Cycle version of the Trojan War (which does not necessarily include the Homeric version), it was in fact Laocoon, Priest of Apollo, who spoke out against Sinon the Greek and the Horse.
After all, it was Laocoon who bore the famous saying in Virgil, “I fear even Greeks bearing gifts,” quickly before he and his son were eaten by sea serpents sent by Poseidon. In some of the surviving lines left from the Epic cycle, when Sinon was explaining the purpose of the horse, it was Laocoon who opposed the idea of bringing it into the city.
“A deadly fraud is this,” He said, “devised by the Achaean chiefs!”
Of course, he had annoyed Apollo just like Cassandra, so his words went unheeded and he lost his life. Poor guy…Apollo is such a jerk.
@Faust – ah, nothing like a good liberal arts education, especially one in the classics. *grin* You are one of the few people I know who would know the difference between the Homeric epics and the Epic Cycle. You rawk!!!!