What I recently experienced on my computer was a proper computer virus attack. Despite the fact that I was the one who got its base of 500 MB on my computer, but little had I known something like this could happen. If you’re Torrent addicted like me, then I can only say one thing better be very very careful while choosing a torrent to download and when someone says something like it is unreliable and the torrent gets deleted from the database, then they really mean it. I thought they were just saying that because of copyright claims.

What happened to my computer could be expected if I had known that the whole thing was a big fat virus. I searched up a torrent for one of the soviftwares I wanted really bad. A very recent torrent with a lot of seeders, just what I was looking for and it was approximately 570 MB. Once it was downloaded, I didn’t get the time to install it instantly so after 2 days, I went back to it’s torrent page to look for it’s key and the torrent website displayed “Torrent deleted”, I thought that was because of copyright problems and continued to the setup.

I had recently deleted the Trial version of Anti-virus guard from my computer and now tried to install kaspersky which was giving me key problems, so I was unprotected in terms of an anti-virus. As I tried to install the software I had downloaded, I got an error. I felt a bit fishy about that but then I saw a folder which said setup, I double-clicked that and there was this file of about 40 MB which said setup and looked just like it, I opened it and nothing happened. Acting impatient as I am, I tried to open it again and then I saw this Command Prompt window which said ‘Copying file 1 of 1′. I closed the window and saw all of my desktop files being deleted and new files being added to the desktop. I tried to open Task Manager, but it said “Task Manager has been disabled by the administrator”. Although I am the administrator on the computer. I felt freaky about that, but now there was no way to get to My Computer and once I got there, Drive C and D were hidden.

So overall, Task manager was disabled. Desktop was deleted, drives were hidden as well as My computer. Browsing could not be done, and there was kind of a complete ban on downloading. There was no way to open Run or to Log off. The computer wasn’t detecting a USB either. The wallpaper was changed to an image which said ‘Your privacy is in Danger’. Out of nowhere this website was popping in and out asking me to download their anti-virus, when I tried to do that my computer restarted automatically. Its base file were write-protected by now.

It was more like a free country being taken over by a whole army of outlaws and goon masterminds. Some knowledge that I had of these things of an operating system, I managed to enable the task manager in the safe mode using group policy. But that was it, I knew nothing more about it, I couldn’t get an anti-virus without which there was no way to get the virus out, I was just left to one choice. Format the whole computer and say good-bye to all the good stuff I had in there.

I lost all of the important things on my computer, and learned a lesson for once. Never download a bad torrent. But how do you know if it is a bad torrent? Now you can check my post about finding the best torrent although the points below are important:

1. Only download torrents which are at least 1-2 days old.
2. Read their comments and take them seriously.
3. Make sure you have a good anti-virus
4. If you feel fishy about the whole thing , then ask an expert before proceeding on the whole thing.
5. Viruses are usually in the disguise in torrents of softwares.

PR: wait… L: wait…