“I never saw a purple cow” and other fictitious animals that can ruin a bloggers day!

July 12th, 2010

Many customers asked me where I was last week. I hope you can learn form the following barnyard analogy.

The “Purple Cow” is the name of a well-known poem by Gelett Burgess that was written in 1895 about a fictitious cow.

The original “Purple Cow” poem went like this.

I never saw a purple cow;
I never hope to see one;
but I can tell you anyhow;
I’d rather see than be one!

Although this author had nothing to do with a Purple Cow last week I did in fact encounter another type of barn yard animal that you will all want to avoid at any cost. It was a horse. In this case the Trojan Horse. Although the poem listed above is about a mythical animal, the one I encountered is all too real and named after the Trojan Horse Story in Greek mythology that appeared as a gift that hides its ultimate purpose.

So what kind of Trojan Horse can affect a blogger? In this case we are referring to malware which is named Trojan Horse which appears to perform desirable functions for a user prior to running or installing applications, applets or other file based features but instead facilitates unauthorized access of the user’s computer system. “It is a harmful piece of software that looks legitimate. Users are typically tricked into loading and executing it on their systems. And then the real fun begins.

Once you have been tricked, one may begin notice a system slowdown, access slowdown or lockups that cause you reboot multiple times and ultimately and scan your system for viruses. Files are indentified by that process that are infected and flagged for cleaning, not deleting. If you unknowingly delete them you may compromise the operation of your operating system that may result in a reload and rebuild of your entire system that can be time consuming and provide a test of your backup processes including password storage.

Be careful what you click on. We’re Back.

We look forward to and appreciate your comments.

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