I'm one of those people who very rarely ever clicks on advertisements. I don't care if the site is advertising my term life insurance price, CSI ring tones, a new dog toy, or porn; in my book, they could all infect my computer with a lethal virus. As a general rule, I also don't open my spam mail for fear of potential viruses and tend to scan every download with Avast. Imagine my surprise then when my computer got not one but four viruses Saturday night after visiting Cartoon Network's web site.My nephew had seen this game called Fusion Fall advertised on the actual TV channel. He had tried to play it on my mom's computer, but, as usual, it wouldn't work on the 10 year old dinosaur. He was all set to play it on mine this weekend. After we set him up with an account name and password, we clicked on the game. An intro played, and then a window popped up saying we had to install the Unity Web Player in order to play Fusion Fall. Stupidly enough, I figured that, because the player was from Cartoon Network, it was safe. Boy was I wrong.
Within minutes of installation, my computer crashed. After a reboot and a second attempt to log into the game, it crashed again. I told Chandler that we weren't going to try the game again until I scanned the computer for viruses. For once, he agreed with me so I started the Avast manual scan. Not five minutes later the Avast sirens went off, alerting me that the program had found a virus. I moved the virus to the virus chest, hoping that the one virus was all that Avast would find. Unfortunately, I was wrong, as the sirens went off three more times. Each found virus was a version of Back Web that was dated for Saturday.
I looked up Back Web on the Internet yesterday. Apparently, there is a legitimate Back Web, a spyware Back Web, and a virus Back Web. While it's altogether possible that Avast wanted me to remove a legitimate version of Back Web because it had the same name as the viral version, the two successive computer crashes have stopped me from exploring that possibility any further. I'm just going to assume that the four instances of Back Web on my computer were, in fact, viruses. My nephew was disappointed that he couldn't play the game, but he also said that he would rather forgo the game and still have one fast computer in the family than play it and have only my mother's.
So for all of you with kids, nieces, or nephews who have been wanting to play Cartoon Network's Fusion Fall, I would recommend that you have them play something else. Your computer and your wallet will thank you.
