Help Yall,I got a worm i cant get rid of (Cpu Assistance Vanity)

Semi Vanity ^ | January 28th 2004 | Dan

[MetalHeadConservative35]

i just scanned my computer for viruses and i came across the WORM SPYBOT.X with trendmircro's house call and it told me its non cleanable and after going to a few sites to see whether or not i can get rid of it,i came up short (i checked a few virus sites and norton's site as well)

any help is appreciated thanks,

Regards from a very ice cold michigan

Dan

[WestCoastGal]

I also have Zone Alarm and found these things tonight, is there anything that would stop these completely. What do they do in the computer?


Need information on parasites in computer. I just found and removed with spybot the following:

SearchEx.... AcrolEHelper.A (two of these in Registry)
SeekSeek 57ACE747-386 Registry
iwon iwon Registry


Anyone know what they are?? Thanks in advance for the help!!

[happydogdesign]

If you don't have Spybot, Search and Destroy, and SpywareBlaster, get them! Both programs are excellent and FREE! You'll be surprised at all the evil crud you have running on your system

Better get the latest update of Ad-aware while you're at it!

Kephyr has a great Spyware and Adware Encyclopedia and a lot of other info, freeware and fun stuff

Andrew Clover also has a great spyware, adware, and parasite info page

Ever wonder what's going on in the background of your PC's devious little processor?
The Windows Process Library helps sort it out

Answers That Work has loads of info including Task List Programs

BillP Studio's WinPatrol is a nice little application with a useful free version that allows you to monitor your system services, manage cookies, and detect those nefarious Browser "Helper" objects. It is like an easy-to-use Task Manager in your System Tray.

[Oschisms]

Bump for later perusal

[BigSkyFreeper]

You're welcome :)

[BigSkyFreeper]

You're welcome :)

[BigSkyFreeper]

Yeow! Glad you got the adware problem taken care of. I've recommended the Google tool bar to a number of users that I've helped locally. It includes a popup blocker that works really well. The toolbar I have has blocked 343 popups since I installed it on this machine (after a reinstall of XP) a month ago.

[BigSkyFreeper]

Good advice!

[Attention Surplus Disorder]

Those are undoubtedly good resources to have but they apparently (and I'm no expert, I'm just relating my very recent experience) are not one bit effective once some of the more recent things out there become attached to/embedded in your cookies for sites you routinely visit. I was pretty surprised that they kept popping up (actually under) on brokerage websites, erroneously thinking they would be far more secure than ebay, for example. Wrong. If they are already there, pop-up killers won't work. I think I dnloaded ALL THREE of Spybot, S&D, and SpywareBlaster with literally no noticeable effect. Surfing ebay, I can guarantee you will accumulate LOADS of the things. The choice I guess is to be "up" on the latest things and how to scour them from your machine; or to be able to remain relatively ignorant of same and get and periodically use an active and vigilant scrubbing program. I choose the latter because I am sure I could foul things up real good removing stuff from my Windows registry. Plus the other thing is that as you visit new sites and acquire new cookies, you're certain to gether more of these irritants. So for now at least, SpyHunter is working quite nicely for me. Until the next upgrade in the arms race, I suppose.

[happydogdesign]

After you get the bugs out, give Mozilla 1.6 a try. It is basically Netcape 7 without all the junk and is one truly fine browser, with a built in pop up blocker, tabbed browsing, excellent cookie management and easy to follow instructions and help. It does not use IE's Active X, which a lot of spyware exploits, and doesn't have the still unresolved IE site spoofing vulnerability.

[happydogdesign]

After you get the bugs out, give Mozilla 1.6 a try. It is basically Netcape 7 without all the junk and is one truly fine browser, with a built in pop up blocker, tabbed browsing, excellent cookie management and easy to follow instructions and help. It does not use IE's Active X, which a lot of spyware exploits, and doesn't have the still unresolved IE site spoofing vulnerability.

[BigSkyFreeper]

Those are small pieces of spyware that track where you go on the internet, which advertisers tailor junk mail to the sites you've visited. Spybot Search & Destroy will take care of those for you.

[BigSkyFreeper]

Yeah, even the slightest typo in the registry will render your system unstable, even unable to boot! Best thing to do is backup the registry first before you do those scrubbing chores, just in case, so you have something to fall back onto in case any of those programs messes up your registry. This shouldn't happen often, but it never hurts to do the old backup! :)

[Attention Surplus Disorder]

For some time I was trying to use Mozilla as a replacement for IE but I found that it did not handle some java applications (like a streaming stock-quote feature of my brokerage that I really like) very well. This was on a 500 Mhz W98 machine that was overdue for replacement, so maybe that observation is no longer valid with the lightly used W2K machine I now have/just got. I found serious delay-latency issues w/Mozilla with streaming stock quotes. That was pretty much a deal-killer for me, otherwise I liked it OK. I will give it another shot. FWIW, I also liked NSCP 6 MUCH better than NSCP 7. These things ultimately boil down to personal taste buds for each user.

[happydogdesign]

I suggest you update the latest versions-my boss's home pc was unusable due to to his kids downloading tons of junk. Spybot and Adaware cleaned up 10 major clots of related executables and associated registry keys after IE6 was rendered useless. It took several runs to clean up the junk, but the system is now clean as a whistle. Take the time to read the tutorials and program info, and update Spybot's immunization feature, along with that of Spyware Blaster-the current pattern profile protects against over 1300 different nasties. Both programs have advanced configurations that are more effective than the default settings. ZoneAlarm is excellent in that you can set it to require programs to request permission to access the Internet, and that can help catch some of these little nasty .exe files that keep reloading themselves after you clean them up. Check the task list file resources I posted in the previous message, as a lot of these nasties disguise themselves as slightly mispelled tasks and apps.

Spybot and Adaware are both free, and I have recently used them to restore several severely disabled PCs to working order

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Useful comments on your thread. I hope you get the problems worked out!

[happydogdesign]

It's not perfect, and I also use IE for the most part, but for new users, or kids, Mozilla is a more secure browser for general surfing. IE still has issues with a known vulnerabilty that can cause problems- bad guys can set up an html page that easily spoofs IE into displaying a legitimate url on a nasty site, and the latest patch has not completely fixed the problem

[Attention Surplus Disorder]

Yes, on my old W98 clunker machine, using Mozilla to surf, IE for email (this in my mind being the most serious vunerability since Outlook is undoubtedly the world's favorite hacker target in the first place) but still gotta use IE to see my stock streamer was a kluge and a half.

Thing is, this appx 1.5 year old Dell W2K 1.8 Ghz machine has operated absolutely flawlessly since I got it, not ONE crash. The worst that has happened was when it got overloaded with those damn pop-unders and with maybe 30 windows open it started paging the windows that were open. To tell you the truth, I am loath to screw with it! But I'll give Mozilla another whack on this new machine. Thanks for your suggestions! (No kids here, porn sites aren't a big issue)

BTW I can tell I JUST NOW got another parasite from somewhere.