Posted on 10/31/2004 10:16:57 AM PST by quidnunc
David Eckstein turned on his computer one day and launched his Web browser, just as he had every day. This time, however, CNN.com did not automatically open. Instead, the page was a search engine he'd never heard of.
Eckstein tried changing the browser settings back to CNN but the search engine would return whenever he rebooted. Finally, he just gave up.
The San Francisco marketing consultant is yet another victim of spyware, an amorphous class of software that mostly gets onto people's computers without their knowledge. So resource-hungry, it often renders the machines unusable.
"It makes you want to throw your computer out the window," Eckstein said.
In the past year, the problem has become epidemic as people spend more time online and spyware developers get more aggressive.
"It makes spam look like a walk in the park," said Bob Bowman, chief executive of Major League Baseball's Internet unit, which in June started banning new advertisers from using such techniques.
As part of a government-backed study, technicians visited Jenna Dye recently in Young Harris, Ga., and found 1,300 spyware-related items on her machine.
"It would shut itself down in the middle of doing stuff. We had lots of pop-ups. The (CD-ROM) drawers would pop open," the mother of two complained. "It's frustrating. We spent $1,800 on our computer and we didn't want to use it."
Until the machine was cleaned up, Dye and her husband would make 2 1/2 hour trips to the nearest mall to avoid shopping online. "We use it every day now again," she said.
Spyware was found on the computers of 80 percent of participants in the study, conducted by America Online Inc. and the National Cyber Security Alliance.
-snip-
(Excerpt) Read more at chron.com ...
AVG is about 6.5Mb +/-......plus you need to get most current definitions after install
Even on my slow dial-up it wasn't bad. I set it to run automatic scheduled system checks and auto-updates.
I'm so confused with all these downloads for free spyware on my hard drive now. I don't know what is running, and what is not.
All I know, is that Ad-Aware has been awesome for me. An interesting item, however, is that recently, I finally convinced dh to get broadband and ditch the liberal blue triangle. I have heard many people raving about Firefox, so I have been giving it a try.
We also installed Trend Micro Internet Security because it has a firewall, and since that time, when I run Ad-Aware I am only seeing maybe one "bug" every few days.
I loved deleting all this little critters, though. :)
Thank you for your Help for viruses and malware
/
thanks.
I know this is an old thread, but, I have an ooooold computer, and am using windows95, have tried to download spybot1.3 several times, but with no sucess.
Any ideas?
I know I've had & used versions of spybot on Win95 machines- what type of DL problems are you encountering? Or is it an install hangup?
In my first attempts it said I had a file missing. When I tries yesterday it said I had corrupted files.
It's also possible your registry has become so bogged down with invalid entries that you are getting problems from that- Win95 is kind of notorious for corrupt registry problems. See if you can find and download an older, free version of regcleaner by jv16 to get rid of the worst problems.
Sometimes disinfecting takes more effort and time than it's worth- if you have your data files backed up, and have all the installation files for the software you need, it may be faster to fdisk, re-format, and reinstall everything.
Good ideas, and I actually understood all of that!
Thanks for your time, I'll let you know how I make out.
FReegards
Quid:
On reboot does IE list the home page as "About:blank?
Maybe the About:blank hijacker is now ".com" but its one of the worst. Even if you have AdAware, Spybot, etc. already download the latest program itself (ideally to a clean PC) and install them, update and then run them.
Hijack This is complicated and time-consuming and can be dangerous but it does work - Backhoe's post at #33 should help.
Good luck!
Mostly tracking cookies, but some registry changes as well. Naturally, it was running like an arthritic dog, with all that garbage aboard.
Spybot and ad-aware get what each other misses, and for what it's worth, AVAST was the only anti-virus I've tried that found changes in command.com and a couple of DLL files, and fixed them. Or claimed to!
Sweet Jesus how wrong can ya get.
"Spyware" was not responsible for Mr. Eckstein's switch.
Oh no-no-no.
...Eckstein encountered "Spareware".
Read later...
Thanks for all the input.
So far I've tried downloading 4 different spyware programs to no avail. I'm always missing an important file, or my files are corrupted.
So on to the next step: Get the program off a floppy as you suggested. I'll get a neighborhood 12 year old computer genious to help. The kid that works for me is pretty good.
Re-format of hard drive will be last resort.
Reformat is a last resort, and be advised that some nasty bugs write the boot sector, so you have to low-level format ( fdisk, which writes zeroes ) to overwrite them. Simply formatting won't get some of them.
Uh oh. Spareware? Ya got me there bub. Whazzat?
FGS
get thee to mozilla.org, and download firefox.
What's that?!!
Spareware, Spareware my good fellow!
Spares the "victim" from seeing crap like CNN on the Internet.!!
...automatically. ;^)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.