In my previous post on the challenges of computer maintenance in Cameroon, I should have mentioned that viruses are a massive problem here. Most people here don't think about security much. Public computers in cyber cafes are usually riddled with viruses, and everyone here uses USB flash drives to store their data. As a result, viruses spread like wildfire. We periodically get contagions here where a new virus spreads to practically every machine on campus.
Since I arrived here I've tried to improve things here by installing Grisoft's AVG Free on just about every machine I can get my hands on, and that has helped a lot. It's a pretty good program, and if you plug in a virus ridden USB key it automatically spots and cleans most viruses.
I've also tried to end the practice of installing multiple anti-virus programs on machines. While many people here pay no attention to security at all, others go overboard and decide that if one anti-virus program will protect their machine, why not three or four? Of course, having three anti-virus programs scanning your system at the same time will probably make your PC as slow as any virus or spyware would, so this ends up being counterproductive. I think they're finally getting that, and so now we usually just have one per machine.
Anyway, yesterday a students came to me asking if I could give him some free software I'd mentioned to him in conversation. I put it on my USB key and plugged into his laptop to copy it over. Later, I plugged into one of the PCs here to do some blog posting and found that I'd picked up a virus from him. AVG was on the machine so it cleaned the infected files, but in the process deleted them all. I made sure to give the guy a copy of AVG free as well and told him to clean his machine. Hopefully he will.
Unfortunately, among the deleted files were a series of blog posts I'd written (I often write them ahead of time and post them later) and pictures I'd selected to go up. I was all set to post tons of pictures of my school and village, but, alas, now I'll have to go rewrite the posts and find the pictures again. Ashia!
Crap. Viruses...
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3 comments:
You should keep all of your important stuff in plain text files. Uninfectable.
My posts I'd written were in a text file. The problem was this particular virus creates an exe with the same name as the folder the file is in and when anti-virus software purges the exe it purges the folder. Next time I will keep it in the root.
As for all the pictures, well, no way to put those in text format. It's OK, I have everything backed up on an external hard drive that I'm careful to never put near any machine that may be infected.
Most USB keys have a small application that will use part of the drive as a private encrypted drive. I wouldn't trust the encryption, but it's a way to segregate the files. Either that or use two USB keys.
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