Can you say "Jeemp"?

The ancient Chinese had a novel way of dealing with the condemned. They would collect feral cats, and starve them for a while. Then the condemned malefactor would be brought forth to a public place, bound hand and foot, and stuffed into a muslin or burlap bag. The cats would then be placed into the bag, and it would be sewn shut. Then a gang of jolly factotums would beat the bag with bamboo canes. Cats, especially the stray, feral variety, do not like to be treated in this fashion. They have a primal tendency to lash out with fang and claw at anything near them when they are in a dark, hostile environment. Given unrelenting abuse, even your household puddy-tat will do you in, if he/she has enough friends and you're in the bag with them.

The Muslims used to have a device that resembled two rowboats, except it had holes for the wrists, ankles, and neck. A person would be pinioned in this "boat", and they would be force-fed milk and honey until they could hold no more. After a while, nature would take its course, and the interior of the "boat" would become, shall we say, rather funky. A while after that, flies would come, attracted to the odor. They would feed on the waste products befouling the interior of the "boat". Flies also lay eggs, and those eggs hatch into maggots. Maggots are not particular about their cusine; they will feed on anything. Once the milk and honey was withheld, the maggots would consume all the offal in the "boat", and continue eating their merry way into whatever else might be at hand, like a hapless human body. It would take days to die, being eaten alive by maggots, and the agony is so exquisite that it defies human imagination.

Whoever sent me the Backdoor\Jeemp\C: computer virus deserves either—or both—of these fates. I would drag a folding chair to the beach, and pack a lunch, just to feast on the screams of some hacker being devoured by maggots or clawed to death by feral cats. This was not the 1 April virus that was ballyhooed in the news; this was a direct, personal attack with a new variant of an oldie-but-goodie. It lodged itself deep in my System Volume Information registry, and established numerous restore points. It lurked in protected, hidden files deep in the bowels of HAL-9000 Mark II. It issued false commands, dropped down command menus, and would scroll down them until it found an active command, then execute it. It seemed to be possessed of AI [Artificial Intelligence]; it had an uncanny awareness that I was going online to register and download anti-virus software, and would relentlessly navigate me off the registration page before I could finish filling in the required fields.

The first cleansing of my hard drive yielded the deletions of two Trojan downloaders (Agent AZ), Backdoor\Bot\67157, a 2006 version of Win32\Sobig\F@mm, and the insidious \Jeemp\C:. My outdated McAfee virus scan couldn't cope with it. My Diskeeper™ defragmentation program would identify it, but my Windows search engines couldn't locate the file. I had the registry number, but no way to get at the bastard and manually delete it. BitDefender™ flushed out the five major problems and destroyed them, but \Jeemp\C: kept coming back. The Windows Service Pack 3, RegCure™, Registry Mechanic™, MalwareBytes.com™ and SuperAntiSpyware™ scans all made the thing go dormant for a while, but as soon as I tried to do anything, on any program, the false commands and the diddling with my scroll lock and number lock would be back with a vengeance. It would delete data from open files, destroying unsaved work, and forcing me to re-open saved versions of said files repeatedly. It would actively engage and block any anti-malware site I tried to Google™ on the Internet. I called several friends of United Possums International on the phone, and asked them to kindly circulate e-mails and a posting at ScrappleFace to the effect that I was not accepting e-mails—deleting them as rapidly as they came in—and certainly not replying to anyone or composing any new blog posts, as I didn't want to spread the joy around.

My bacon was saved, so to speak, by the two Macs: Merle M. and McAfee. M.M. sent me a link to McAfee Sunday night. I chased it deep enough into their site that I found a 30-day trial download of Security Center 2009™. This thing took about two-and-a-half hours to download. I started at 2100 hours last night; at 0630 this morning, the dreaded registry code did not appear when I defragmented HAL-9000 for the umpteenth time. I purged restore points, cookies, my browser history, cache, and a bunch of other stuff I'm too groggy to remember. I deleted several .exe programs that I will have to restore after I avail myself of food and sleep. It's 11:45 as I write this; I'm past 24 hours without sleep, and feeling it. When the Insomnia Monster visits, I like it to be on my terms, not sitting feverishly at a computer, shedding tears and shouting "Please, God, let this work! I'll buy the damn thing if it works!"

Guess what? I think it worked. I wouldn't be sending this if I didn't think it has. I have been piddling with various programs since 0630, and I haven't gotten the first bogus command. The scroll and number lock lights have been constant and dependable.

I think I killed it. Diskeeper™ could locate, identify, and defragment the virus, but you cannot take direct action from that program. I had to do three forced re-boots this morning before the thing disappeared, but purging the system restore points unprotected the files, and the updated McAfee™ program apparently eliminated the nasty little bug. Despite the socialist predations of the Manchurian Candidate and his Congressional myrmidons, I cannot find solace in my fine Kentucky whiskey this month. That budget is blown; I have to go pay the piper over at McAfee.com. Better to be sober and virus-free than to sit here hammered while some basement-dwelling creature drives my computer without me setting a finger to the keyboard. It's money well spent if I don't have to go through this again.

I did not post the comments to the most recent post at UPI. All e-mail went to Internet Hell as soon as it arrived. Since I'm running a week behind, this letter is doubtless going to become my latest blog post. Osama Bamalama is moving too fast for me to keep up. There's a headbanger song with a refrain of "Let the bodies hit the floor!"—all I can understand of the lyrics. I don't do crank and oxycontin, so most of that yowling and growling is lost on me. I like the guitar riffs, though. I want to see how this 63% approval rating for The Manchurian Candidate shakes out when the bodies literally start hitting the floor and he's whining for the UN to write someone a letter telling them how really, really angry we are.

Hide somewhere and watch.

This could have been an attack by a drug-peddling Hindu telemarketer who got tag-teamed by the little woman and me some weeks ago. It might have been someone who disagrees with my [conservative] Libertarian point of view. Or, it might just have been one of the princes of Africa who send me those letters fishing in the wrong pond and promising millions of $USD if I'll only send them my phone numbers, bank account codes, PINs, and my Social Security number.

A word to my wise friends online: please be judicious about sending me e-mails. If I have been remiss about replying or acknowledging communications in the past, I am now obsessive about not doing so. I don't open any attachments unless you know the Secret Squirrel unlisted phone number, and call to tell me I should peek at your—safe—attachment . Previously, my attention to online shenanigans has been dictated by ignorance, apathy, and indifference: "I don't know, I don't care, and it doesn't matter anyhow." Interspersed with that are the occasional bows to health matters. Now, I'm proactively hostile towards my e-mail, so be gentle with me when you write. I have too many firewalls and too much virus protection now; lag time on all my programs is, like, forever while they get scanned.