Daniel Rubin | Card, virus, an eye on the world

Beware the Hallmark e-card.

My mother didn't raise me to open e-mail attachments from strangers, but in the holiday season, I saw little risk in clicking something from that kindly greeting-card company.

The worst that could happen, I figured, was losing a couple of seconds of my life to a dancing turkey.

As soon as I clicked the link, I regretted it.

Expecting the worst, I Googled the caption on the e-mail: "You've received a Hallmark e-card!" and found what I feared at Snopes.com, the urban-legend site I always send friends to when I smell a scam.

After some more research, I learned I had set a place at my computer table for Trojan.vundo.

Hallmark doesn't send e-cards without telling you whom they're from, says spokeswoman Linda Odell. "Whoever is doing this is trading on a name that people trust. We certainly don't like that."

The next morning, a suspicious yellow shield - the same kind my anti-virus program uses to show it's on the job - blinked for attention. Messages kept popping up, announcing I'd been infected with some sort of heinous spyware that could scour my hard-drive for passwords, credit card info - the whole nightmare.

The "warnings" advised I could fix the damage by clicking the blinking shield.

The virus came on fast. Internet browsers started opening, so many at once it was all I could do to close them. All windows led to Savetheinformation.com, where I'm guessing they wanted money to stop what the scammer had started.

Instead, I ran a spyware-catching program and my anti-virus software. Nothing.

I was in over my head. So I called Symantec, which makes my anti-virus program, and quickly parted with $99 to rid the family computer of this cyber-plague.

This is what got me to a young woman with a clipped voice whose name sounded like Sorry. She'd be spending the next few hours examining my hurting computer.

For the first half hour our relationship was business-like, as I let her move her cursor around my screen and dig into my hard drives.

Through every folder on my desktop she rummaged, pausing at suspicious files.

How was my day going? she asked.

"It really hasn't started," I said, slightly taken aback. In fact, my day was going nowhere.

"Where are you calling from?"

"Philadelphia."

"Ah," she said, "It is 9:18 in the morning." Maybe she spelled it Sari.

After a few more minutes, she asked, "Do you download a lot of games?" I explained about the kids.

"Only from authorized sites," she reminded me.

The pop-ups continued. She clicked them away with a practiced flick.

"How's the weather?" she asked.

By now we'd been on the line more than an hour.

"Pretty cold," I answered, warming up myself. "And it's about time."

I asked about her. "How about where you are? Where is that?"

"India," she said. "It is hot."

This opening led to one of my famously smooth attempts to connect. I started telling her about the movie we saw over the weekend.

"Have you seen

The Darjeeling Limited

?"

No.

A long pause followed. At least I didn't go on about

Monsoon Wedding

. Thinking fast, I mentioned how afterward my wife and I had to go find Indian food.

Another pause.

"Vegetarian or non-vegetarian?"

For my $99 I was not only getting rid of a virus, I was gaining an education in diplomacy, in the sort of remote, disembodied way the Internet allows.

Diagnosis in hand, Sari said fixing the problem was going to take a while, so I could hang up, and she'd let me know when she was finished.

For 45 minutes I watched her copy and clean the registry, with surgical precision excising questionable files with names like "security center."

Then the phone rang. "Your infection is gone," she announced, and so was she.