Getting a Back Door Virus

So I've been battling a computer virus. Nasty business if you ask me. I've had the free AVG anti-virus software for close to ten years. I've had viruses but AVG took care of them. This one was a tough one. Maybe it was me not keeping AVG up to date or maybe it was them. I don't know. All I know is that the virus couldn't be deleted. The computer would freeze and I'd have to do a restart. At one point I closed all the applications and all of a sudden a woman's voice came on. It was too soft to hear what she said. So I turned up the volume and rap music started blaring from my speakers. I have rap songs on my music catalog, but nothing like this. I hate to admit it, but I got the chills. Someone had taken over my computer.

I quickly turned it off, disconnected the online cable and restarted it. It froze. I restarted it again. It let me in so I did a scan with Spybot Search and Destroy and another with Lavasoft Adware. They all found and removed infected items.

So I went back online. Seemed ok. I tried to go to Microsoft updates and it froze. This went on every time I went on Microsoft. I must've restarted the computer about fifty times. At one point whenever I clicked on Microsoft updates it would redirect me to other sites . Finally the computer wouldn't let me do anything so I did a PC recovery. It was a good thing I had all my stuff backed up on Carbonite. I've lost files before so I've learned the hard way to do back ups.

Once I did the recovery, I could get into Microsoft. So I did all the updates. I also figured it was time to not be cheap and buy a good anti-virus. I went to sites that reviewed the software and found
Bit Defender. It was highly rated at a good price. So I bought it. I tried to download it but it told me it couldn't download because I had a virus. It suggested I do an online scan, which I did. Two hours later it found a back door virus it couldn't remove. That was odd. What was I supposed to do now?

My brother in law Joe told me to do an online scan using Kaspersky, which was another highly rated software. Two hours later it found the same virus and it could not remove it. So I copied the name of the virus and googled it. I found another website called Adware Alert, which found a ton of viruses. I started entering my personal data but on a hunch I did a review of the website. Turns out some reviews claim it gives out false positives on viruses. Who knows if this is true or not, I don't want to take any chances so I didn't buy it.

I finally found another site called Cyber Defender. It scanned and found viruses in five minutes. Cost fifty bucks though. But that's for 5 computers. We only have four but that's ok. The bad part is that now I'm concerned about identity theft. How much personal information, if any, did the intruders find from the computer? Should I cancel my credit cards? What about my bank account? I called my bank and they told me to send a fraud alert to the credit monitoring services and check my bank account regularly. It seemed too much work so I gave the work to
Lifelock. This is the one who gives out the CEO's social security number and dares people to use it. A couple of days later they sent me several emails notifying me that they've put out a fraud alert to the three services. They've opted me out of getting credit card applications through the mail and also not getting any more junk mail. Not bad for ten bucks. That's monthly, so I don't know how long I'll do it for. A few months maybe. It would've taken me a long time to do all that. I'm slow.

So what have I learned from this aside from the obvious don't be cheap. All I can think is, well, nothing. I already know everything I need to know about not getting viruses. Just whatever it is I did to get it, Don't Do It. It's the opposite of
Nike. I KNOW what I did to get it. I'm just not saying.