John Bell, owner of Traffic Swirl  just had the scare that would have surely given me a heart attack – he was surfing multiple sites like he normally does and then this happened.  I will just post what he put in the room as I really think this is important for all to see.

[5:21:47 PM] John Bell: I just got a virus about 20 minutes ago, going to share the info about it below in case anyone has something similar happen, it came from a TE but not sure which one so there is a chance it’ll be going around in our communities soon if it hasn’t already
[5:21:54 PM] John Bell: It disguised itself as jucheck.exe which is a legitimate file so it was really difficult to find but it told me there were errors on my hard drive and wanted me to fix it – I’ve had those things before and know better, but as it did this it also hid ALL the files on my computer so it looked as though absolutely everything was gone, even with show hidden files enabled they were sans.

This ALMOST made me click the buy button to get the software to fix it, as the virus is intended for you to do, however I discovered some program called Unhide and it goes through your system and removes hidden marks from all your files.

Moral of the story – if you get an error message on your computer about an IO error telling you there are all kinds of programs and you notice all your desktop and start menu items vanish and they appear to be gone on your desktop, it can be resolved.

Step 1) Don’t freak out.
Step 2) Run AntiVirus
Step 3) Run anti-malware
Step 4) Run Unhide (downloadable at a site called ‘Bleeping Computer’
Step 5) Listen to dance music to re-invigorate your spirits.

Hopefully this information will be useless to everyone.

Thanks John for letting us know what to do if this happens to us and thanks John for allowing me to post this.  So even with as busy as we sometimes get it’s good idea to lurk in Skype Group rooms you are in – you just never know when there is info that will be there that you can use.