June 11, 2004
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Update: Slate.com has an article: Virus-proof your PC in 20 minutes, for free. Commonsense stuff, but the kind of thing newbies don’t know about.
It also links to Spybot Search & Destroy, which is a piece of freeware cooked up by hacker-activists. Yay hacker-activists!
I spent a bunch of time today on the phone, helping a friend deal with some malware on her employer’s PC. She followed a reasonable, non-porn link on a web page and ended up at a porn site that put a bunch of programs on her computer.
The most useful site we found for dealing with this stuff was DoxDesk’s parasite page, which can scan your computer for malware and walk you through its removal.
It’s insane stuff. These programs install themselves, change your computer’s settings, open pop-up windows willy-nilly… I hadn’t realized how completely bad it is. If you’re running Windows, go to that link up there and find out what programs you’ve got running that maybe you don’t want.
And when you think about it, it’s creepy that the linked page can do that in the first place.
Comments (14)
Thanks for the link, man. I came out squeaky clean, but I’m thinking we still have a trojan problem. I’ll pop in later and give a more formal hello. Take care! -Ben
excellent link. as expected.
Yeah, that stuff’s creepy. If there is one thing I hate in my Internet experience, it’s pop-ups of ANY kind (porn or otherwise).
I tend to agree.
The superinstall popup ickinesses of doom are bad enough. The fix is good, but near or more disturbing.
And I shouldn’t post comments when I’ve been awake this long. Hail coffee.
Thanks so much for that link. I just went through some crap like that and it will be nice to have that for the future.
Spyboy Search and Destroy is probably the best program out there right now. It even has a resident option that will alert if a web page tries to make changes to your Favorites, or registry.
that would have been a great opportunity to introduce her to Firefox
One of the most notorious hijackers, with about 43 vaiants, is the CoolWebSearch hijacker. The CWSShredder eliminates all variants and is available here:
http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/cwschronicles.html
I see that your link has a link to it.
Yah, my friend’s machine had the CoolWebSearch one, but the Shredder web site wasn’t responding at the time. So I held her dainty hand (over the phone line) and walked her through the process of removing it manually.
We also dealt with the SaveNow and the InternetOptimizer ones. There were still two or three left on the machine when she left work, as well, but they were classified as harmless by the scanner.
Spybot Search and Destroy is definitely a very good anti-malware program. I would also suggest Ad-Aware, 6th edition being the latest. Both of these programs are available at http://www.download.com.
Hmm… it’s like an ad for an anti-ad. Amazing.
I’m so glad us Mac users don’t have to deal with spyware.
It’s such a perfect sign of the times and the consciousness of our society. It’s almost a shame to see them go.
more great links, thanks man.
it’s good to not run windows, yesirreee…
and thanks for the random x updates.
btw…. i feel really ignorant about this.. but i haven’t yet figured out a way to get os x to defrag my hard drive….. what am i missing?