For about a week now the network at home has been slow. Just as I’d get frustrated enough to do something about it it’d get fast again, so I procrastinated.

Meanwhile I was cursing Time Warner, Linksys, Apple, and just about everybody else whose hardware I own. The Linksys wireless router is 5 years old, but come on, it should still work!

This morning my wife complained of web access on the desktop being slow, so I sat down to take a look. Sure enough, very slow. It was odd that the computer itself wasn’t as responsive as it used to be, but then it is a windows box, so curse Microsoft.

As I was dialing Time Warner to schedule someone to come out and take a look I started to look for a bandwidth tester so I could prove how crappy their service was. Oddly the search results didn’t actually go to a bandwidth meter, but rather to an intermediary page with lots of links to bandwidth meters.

And that’s when I realized: I gots me a virus. Fantastic. It’s sitting there eating my bandwidth, probably spamming the world.

Point is, I was ready to blame everyone in the world instead of thinking it’s a virus. If the virus authors hadn’t put in the search redirection they could’ve probably lived on for another month sending their merry spam.

I’m certain a clever virus could infect a very large percentage of the world’s computers without anyone noticing. Probably already has.