About Security and You: dgosling's Place

 My Computer was infected with Spyware and Adware in 2003 and I couldn't find a way to clean it. I downloaded Ad-Aware the original free program and it was unable to remove all of the junk. I decided to visit the old forums at Lavasoft for some help and the people there were wonderful. However, they were unable to get my PC completely clean. I asked them if they knew of somewhere else I could get help and they referred me to the Tom Coyote Forums.  After using the recommended programs there and getting help from the staff I was able to get my computer completely clean without formatting it.

 While I was there I discovered they had just started a school to teach people to clean computers and I was very interested.  I joined the school, but shortly afterwards the entire forum and school were DDOS'ed off the internet by some of the troll's that did not want people to learn how to remove the malware.  All students at Tom Coyote moved over to SpywareInfo to continue their education and I graduated from there as a Spyware Fighter.

As my roots and loyalties were at Tom Coyote and the forum and school were just coming back online after the DDOS, I returned there to help others clean their computers.

Over time as I learned more, I went on to become a Teacher and finally an Administrator and Teacher at Tom Coyote.

In July 2005 I was honoured to receive my first MVP award from Microsoft for the work I was doing in the forums.  As this is an Annual award that I had to qualify for, I was lucky enough to be re-awarded in both 2006 and 2007.

In 2006 I branched out to also become a member of the PhishSquad at CastleCops forum.  I went on to do other work in Malware detection while helping Microsoft on several projects and continuing to help in the forums as well as helping people at home to clean their computers.

It is a great honour to me to be recognized for the work I do and hope to continue helping people clean Malware from their computers for a long time to come.

My blog is here to provide information for the general public on how to secure their computers against infection by Spyware and Malware.  I hope everyone will find something useful in my blog.   

 Optimized for viewing in Mozilla FireFox, For some strange reason beyond my comprehension it does not render well in Internet Explorer