The Source of the Contamination Found (I Hope)

I am currently working on building a new business and website directory for the website. One of the features of the new directory is thumbnail sized images of all the websites listed in the directory. The directory currently has over 1,100 website listings and doing this manually was out of the question. So I found a great program that automatically fetches thumbnail images for me. I feed it a list of web pages and it opens them up and takes a screen shot. The downside is the program requires the use of the Internet Explorer web browser to capture the images.

So whats wrong with Internet Explorer? Unlike other popular web browsers like Firefox and Opera, Internet Explorer comes with the ability to interact directly with the Windows operating system. A great idea, in theory. For example, it allows a person to update their operating system through the browser at the Windows Update website. The downside is that computer viruses also take advantage of this ability for the browser to manipulate the operating system and use it to infect your computer with a virus. Something I had the joy of experiencing first hand when I forgot to set my Internet Explorer security settings to high before starting the program to grab screen shots of the 1,100 plus websites.

Removing the virus was the easy part, reinstalling the operating system takes less than an hour, the real problem was to figure out which of the 1,100 plus websites was handing out the virus. If in fact, it was only one and not multiple websites carrying viruses.

Today I found what hopefully was the one and only website that carried a virus. It was the old website for the Chelan County Fire District 7. I won't print the URL and please don't go looking for it, trust me, it's a virus. Their new website is located at the Go Lake Chelan website and is virus free.

The question you might wonder is why does the old Chelan County Fire District 7 website have a virus that installs itself on your computer if you view the page in Internet Explorer? Well, what happened is that they discontinued their website and someone else picked up the domain name. Now instead of finding information about Chelan County Fire District 7, you get a web page that tries to install a virus on your computer. How are people allowed to buy discontinued websites and put virus installing scripts in their place? I'm not sure, but they do, so be careful where and how you surf the web.