We're all familiar with the Blue Screen of Death (or BSoD) giving you a friendly notice that your computer has encountered a critical system error, which makes Microsoft's latest Black Screen of Death just that bit more exciting.
An unlucky lucky number of Windows 7 users this week have faced said black screen after logging on to their system. The problem has also affected Windows Vista and XP.
Initial reports that the problem was due to updates issued by Microsoft on the November patch have proved to be false, and instead the culprit has been found to be some good old-fashioned malware.
Microsoft said in a blog posting on its security site that it believed the malware was most likely from the Daonol family, and had nothing to do with the tech giant's security updates.
If you want to ensure that your PC isn't infected, make sure you've downloaded and applied the latest patches for your OS and other applications. Most malware works by exploiting known vulnerabilities that have had patches created to address the problem.
While this may sound like we're stating the obvious, you can also protect yourself from black-is-the-new-blue by simply running security software to protect your computer from malware. In these tight-financial times, you don't have to spend a fortune, and can download something as basic as Microsoft's Security Essentials for the very reasonable price of free.
Security Essentials, as the name implies, is on the basic side, but combined with Windows' pre-packed firewall and the Windows Defender antispyware tool, would be sufficient to protect from this latest Trojan doing the rounds.
Have you bit hit by the black out? Leave us a comment (if you can log on to someone else's computer"¦) and let us know.
3 thoughts on “Windows 7 Black Screen of Death Caused by Malware: Safety Tips”
I was affected by this black screen crisis. It has happened to me during the most inconvenient times. I have lost some hours of work because of this black screen. Before I could save some documents the infamous black screen occurred.
As a always say…. BUY A MAC!
Running XPpro. In January the main board died. At least I think thats what happened. So I rebuilt and used the same c: drive to boot. Had reasons due to specialized software that I didn’t want to reinstall. It worked for about two weeks and then got the black screen. Took that drive out and installed a new one. Still have one special software to reinstall. However, I didn’t know about this black screen being a possible malware problem until now and have using the original eide C: drive via a USB adaptor to move files off of it. Now that I know about this new/old malware I will double check that drive.