February 16: A Virus You Say?

I mentioned that I was recently forced to overcome some computer issues with our old dinosaur of an iMac. No, it's not one of those neon-colored deals from about 10+ years ago, but it's still pretty much obsolete. Although for Macs, obsolete is pretty much what your computer becomes immediately after you remove it from the box. Our issue began with a simple Internet visit. My wife was reading an article on Yahoo! when a pop-up informed her that we were running a virus and we needed to remove it immediately; a screen I have never seen before. It appeared we had an option of "Cancel" or "Continue"; the latter to which I assume would have linked us to a solution o some sort for removing the nasty bug. However, before making a selection, the screen quickly jumped to another window that resembled the look of a Windows computer running some form of diagnostic on the hard drive. Thankfully, my wife just quit the browser all together before anything further evolved. I was at the store during the whole incident, so, upon returning home, I had to see it for myself. Of course, I got the same warning, which prompted me to take the same action as my wife. Now, those of you who know us, realize that we can get kind of paranoid over certain things, this being one of them, and, from time-to-time, perhaps react irrationally. Again, this being one of those times. For fear that someone had hacked our system and our bank accounts would be drained within the hour, I completely removed the Internet connection. And, there our iMac sat...all night, all the next day, no Internet connection. During this process, I journeyed over to the local Apple store with the intentions of actually buying some antivirus software for the first time in my life. Over 15 years I've been a Mac User and never once even considered antivirus software. See, there's this idea amongst Mac people that Mac computers are impervious to any kind of virus. The statistics support that Macs do experience far fewer virus incidents, however, I was quickly convincing myself that the statistics were going to fail us in this instance. The associates at the Apple Store ensured me that what we saw was merely a hoax; someone attempting to scare us into clicking a link to some antivirus software promotion or some other site that would do further damage to our machine. I guess this particular hoax is not all that uncommon. I was told that buying antivirus software would be a waste of my money, so, of course, being the technological sheep that I am, I did not make the purchase. Instead, I went back home and in the evening began switching out our old iMac with the one we inherited from my parents. I figured we'd never be fully comfortable using the old system going forward, so why not just make a complete change. Although, sitting here now, 6:00 am the next morning, waiting impatiently for my files from one machine to copy over to the other, I'm starting to think we should have just rolled the dice on the whole virus thing and continued forward status quo. Bummer.