Access Denied

I cannot believe that my laptop has been subjected to potential harm. I’ve had it for about 2 weeks, and even though it was bought refurbished, it's pretty secure and fast and I have no complaints about it at all. Now whenever I switch on the screen, I have this unwanted make believe anti-virus soft ware program that has attached itself like a leech to the hard drive of my laptop and threatens to overtake everything on it.

This malicious program is unrelenting in telling me that I apparently have numerous viruses on my system, and the solution would be to register with its own fake-make-believe-trying-to-scam-it anti-virus software. As it threatens to wreak havoc, I can't even un-install the bug because the Fully Grown Mutant Ninja Trojan has somehow blocked my laptop responding to the commands to do so. I shouldn’t have really trusted just any site to allow online streaming of a Tyler Perry Movie, especially when all the words were in Chinese...

One thing I realised about this unwelcome visitor is that it was leading me to believe that I had a virus. It was telling me that I had untold Trojans that were trying to hack into my system and potentially destroy all files on my laptop and render it corrupt. But here’s the thing – I didn’t even have any viruses on my laptop. The intruder was in fact a virus in itself designed to foil unsuspecting and gullible internet users (not me surely) into committing to register with it in order to get money. No doubt when the credit card details have been given over, this would open a door for the real virus to come in. Here's another thing - I didn’t intentionally download this program or make any advances in even trying to - it was simply because the site I had visited was contagious, therefore, my system was instantly infected.

I think back to the days when I had chickenpox. First my sister's had it, then my brother and then me. They were infected with something that was contagious and making contact with them meant that I too, inevitably caught the pox. Had we had vaccinations, we would have been protected with our very own anti-virus safeguard. Although I had protection set up on my laptop and it was alert in letting me know that there were attacks coming, it didn’t have the full power needed to totally rebuff the malicious attempts. Had my computer been totally and fully protected, the attempts to attack would have made low impact.

I was reading a daily devotional today, and the title of it was called ‘Don’t Believe the Lie’. The devotional encouraged believers to walk in the truth and knowledge of their existence in Christ, and to totally reject all things that were fabrications of the truth. I thought about this program and how it had masqueraded itself as sincere in the aim that I would believe I had infections on my computer. Because of this lie, I could not understand that this was not actually the truth. I could only make a judgement by what was presented to me and without seeing the absolute picture; I could only make a relative judgement.

We can also have our very own fully powered, no-need-to-worry- about-a-thing anti-virus safeguard that is in place to shield us from the attacks we face each day, be it trials and temptations, bad words, accusations, condemnations that aims to simply cut up and destroy. I see these in the same way as those bad minded cyber rouges that shoots to kill in the subtlest of ways. The first shot simply wounds, wound gets infected, left unattended, eventually spreads and then...

What’s your anti-virus? Macafee? Norton? Mine? Simply Christ. Many oppositions that come up in a day, a negative word that has you believing a little less about yourself, a manager that has control issues and makes you believe you are partially effective in your role at work, a fall into a temptation that you thought you had overcome, a testing situation that sees you lose your cool, a thought less becoming. Whatever the Trojan may be where there is an attack, there is a need to be on the defence; a need to stay protected a need to check that your anti-virus safeguard is on. The Trojan aims to make you believe in the lie that you have to accept the negative, but that is only relative until you know the absolute truth. The truth? The virus has nothing on you once you are protected. Once the intrusions come, simply rely on the anti-virus to work and say 'Access Denied'.