Internet in Ecuador

Wow. Internet connections are fun in Ecuador. I don’t have Internet service at my home. It is extremely expensive, unreliable and the standard systems are dial-up, which are very slow. Also the standard in-home systems are rife with all kinds of worms and virus and bugs. Dangerous, very dangerous.

In fact, most of the time I go either to a couple of places around town that offer WiFi, where it’s free, or go to an Internet café that uses T1 lines. It’s faster, safer, and cheaper.

Well, my next door neighbor decided to give the in-house service a try. This involves buying a pre-paid Internet service card. You connect your computer to a phone line, dial up and you can use the Internet while there is a balance on your pre-paid card.

There are problems with this. For one, there are access charges on phone calls in Ecuador, and the phone bills can really escalate the cost of your Internet use.

Anyway, she’s having problems connecting. No phone connection, but the phone is working. As an experiment, I bring my laptop over to her place, plug it in, and successfully connect. So I know the problem is in her modem set up. I disconnect, and as I do so…

I notice my Firewall and virus shield are turned off.

Oh no. How’d that happen?

Well, first I find the problem with her modem and get her going. I go home and check my computer. My McAfee Virus Scan shows me 148 files are infected with a worm.

And this is a nasty little worm. It doesn’t do a lot of damage, but like all of it’s kind it just keeps replicating itself. The problem with worms is that sometimes while you do a scan it will jump from an infected area into a “cleaned” area. It can take four or five scans to truly eradicate the little beastie. In this case it took me five full, high powered scans with the latest McAfee software, spread over four days, to finally kill the little bastid.

All for just helping a neighbor.

Oh, and by the way, she connected up an older laptop without any security programs in place. Within two hours of being connected her computer crashed. A technician she called said it was infected so badly with so many viruses that the only real solution is to wipe the hard drive clean and reinstall all the operating systems from scratch.

Ouch.

Careful what you plug into.