My dh's e-mail was infected with the virus that sends out an e-mail to everyone in the contact list telling them that the person is in Scotland and needs money. Are you familiar with that one?
Anyway, I quickly bought and downloaded Norton Anti-Virus for Mac and tried to install it but, it wouldn't install and kept telling me it was incompatible with my computer. SO, I tried to find a telephone number for Norton tech-support but the ONLY address Google would give me was for a company based in India. This company swore to me they were PARTNERS with Norton. Long story short, I got royally ripped off because they charged me $300 -- BUT -- at least they were able to get my computer to allow Norton to install the Anti-Virus software I bought.
I ran the Norton Anti-Virus software and did a complete scan of my computer. It took over 10 hours to complete! Is that normal? Anyway, after the complete scan Norton said that I had two viruses that it quarantined.
The thing I'm wondering now is -- when I go to a sight that needs strong Anti-Virus protection (like e-mail, or my bank website) suddenly the hard drive starts churning. It only happens on those kind of websites. Is this spyware? Is someone accessing my computer when that churning of my hard drive starts? Is someone running a keylogging program? What is going on?
First, what kind of Mac do you have, and which product did this company install? Norton AntiVirus 11 is compatible with Mac OS X 10.4 - 10.6, and Norton AntiVirus 12 is compatible with Mac OS X 10.7. Make sure you have the correct version of hte product installed by first going to your Apple menu, and choosing "About this Mac" to look up the version of Mac OS X you are running. Then open the Norton AntiVirus application, choose "About" from the "Norton AntiVirus" menu, and look at the version number it reports.
Secondly, the first antivirus scan can take a long time; 10 hours is about normal. It has to read every file on your Mac's hard drive.
Finally, it's hard to say what causes your hard drive to "churn". The hard drive spins-up when the operating system thinks it needs to access something on your disk. It's highly improbable that this is caused by spyware; many times it's caused by your Web browser needing more memory (or some othe resource like a graphics file). It's nothing to be concerned about; if you do encounter any more malware, Norton AntiVirus will detect it in the background, so your Mac is safe.
Thank you for responding! I was beginning to wonder if anyone would.
My Mac is a 17" laptop, 1.33 GHz Power PC G4.
The Mac OS is 10.5.8. with memory: 1 GB DDR SDRAM
And, the Norton Anti-Virus is 11.1.2. (17)
This Mac has served us well for many years without any trouble whatsoever. When my husband's e-mail was hacked into and caused his e-mail to send out that crazy message to everyone in his contact list, we were shocked. The damage seemingly was contained with his e-mail because his personal file that he had in his yahoo mail is gone as well as all the contacts, they're all gone too. However, everything else seems to be okay.
We were foolishly unaware that this kind of thing could happen on a Mac. The churning hard-drive problem continues and I am still concerned that there may be something very wrong. We share a house with two other people who have PCs, not Macs. I am very worried because it does not seem right that on this shared Verizon wireless network, with these two other people -- it was our Mac that got hacked and NOT their PCs.
Anyway, I will continue to update and run the Anti-Virus software daily from now on. I don't ever want anything like this to ever happen again!
prb: Regarding your "Hard Drive Churning" issue, following is a link that should help you track down the cause using "Activity Monitor.app" located in your "Utilities" folder.
Regarding the e-mail issue, it is likely you were a victim of some form of a phishing scam in which your husband provided his e-mail address and possibly his password to a fake or malicious site.
• Think twice before providing personal info.
• Try using something like "foo@foobar.com" for forum and blog posting.
• Set up a separate "disposable" e-mail account with no important contacts for casual browsing.
• Go through all the privacy settings in your main account and lock it down. Create a few disposable aliases for this account.
• Use strong and unique-for-each-account passwords.
• Firefox +NoScript +AdBlock is a great combination for safer browsing.