A friend of mine was using USB flash drives to cart her homework to and from college. One day there was a problem. She wasn’t sure what was going on but she did the smart thing and stopped what she was doing to run her virus protection software, in her case, AVG.

 

When it completed the scan she found that sure enough, it had found something – delete, quarantine or ignore it asked? She did what would seem to be the most logical thing to do – she chose delete. Problem is that it was a worm virus that attached itself to a dll file for Windows Explorer, so by choosing delete, she could no longer navigate through her files. Opening My Computer and then double clicking on one of her hard drives now just comes up with an error – how would you like to open this file? Windows will have to be reinstalled.

 

This has got me thinking – how was she to know? Of course deleting a virus is a good idea – right? Was it because the free AVG virus anti-software she was using was not advanced enough to tell her it was part of a critical file? Or at times, is there just no way to beat a clever virus?