[Fiddlstix]

BTTT

[peyton randolph]

Spybot S&D, AdAware, and Hijack This! do wonders to prevent malware from taking over one's computer. All are freeware available on the WWW.

[Drango]

As part of a government-backed study, technicians visited

Finally. Government action! Government solved the SPAM problem and they can solve spywear.

[KoRn]

Spyware is a serious problem, and is a total b1tch to get rid of. Hell, I'm a systems engineer and I get hit with it every now and again. They need to treat the people who develope the stuff as real criminals instead of this wrist slapping that's going on.

[RadioAstronomer]

That is not "spyware". That is a redirection trojan, possibly of the Qhost variety.

[Boundless]

Anyone who isn't running a firewall, and an up-to-date
anti-virus package, needs to assume that not only is
there spyware present, but also:

- some of it is keylogging everthing they do, including
usernames, passwords, account numbers, and sending it out

- the machine is a sleeper zombie. When the next major DDoS
attack happens, your machine could be one of the attackers.

Even the free version of ZoneAlarm is a decent firewall,
and unlike most others, alerts you to spyware trying to
phone home (outgoing traffic, not just inbound probes).
http://www.zonelabs.com/store/content/home.jsp

Any of the anti-virus products are fine.

Several sites offer free spyware scanners.

[DaGman]

"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."

AOL itself is one big piece of spyware.

[Sisku Hanne]

Practice safe surf:
Adaware backed up by Spybot. Run Adaware every day on bootup and Spybot once a week. ZoneAlarm personal firewall. And the best anti-virus: AVG.
All of these tools are free online. Make sure you keep them updated with the latest versions.

[JoJo Gunn]

bump....

[PLK]

The search engine toolbars are some of the worst offenders. Do not EVER download the Google or Dogpile toolbars. You will regret it forever.

[plushaye]

I'm afraid to go to Drudge anymore because it installs Szonfi desktop(?) which tries to dial out. I run spybot quite often and all the stuff seems to come after visiting Drudge.

[Cutterjohnmhb]

Though there are great free programs to rid a computer of these foul programs .What I consider, illegal hijacking of a person computer. There should be laws against this, with those companies engaging in this tactic fined heavily and shut down if it continues. It's an invasion of privacy, as well as malicious tampering with ones computer.

[ASA Vet]

I have little sympathy for David Eckstein or anyone else who has Commie News Network as their home page.

[Cicero]

Like everything else to do with computers, you just have to learn to deal with it.

The major anti-spyware programs have already been mentioned. I have also occasionally found it necessary to clean up my Registry after deleting some of these programs.

I use RegCleaner. I hesitate to recommend this or any other registry cleaner because they can be very dangerous, but so far it has worked for me. Some programs have just refused to let go until I removed the registry entries.

[Hendrix]

I had that happen to me. Some homepage called "about" kept replacing my homepage and would not let me go to certain sites. I have a firewall, norton anti-virus (which I update every few days), and spybot. I could not get the stupid thing off. Every time I would change my homepage back, it would get changed back to this "about" search page. Finally, I got on the internet and found how to solve it. I had to go into the about page, copy the first line of code and paste it at a website that told me what the file was called, then go into windows and rename that file (it won't let you delete it). It was fixed after all of that. That was the only thing that would solve it.

[backhoe]

Help for viruses and malware:

 

 Ad-Aware ... Spybot ... Peper Uninstaller ... HijackThis... CWShredder ... Spyware Blaster ... IE Spyad ... Free online Virus scan ... AVG AntiVirus ... LSPfix ... How to Show Hidden Files ... How to boot into Safe Mode ... How did I get infected in the first place?

---

Things you need--(all FREE)
Anti-Virus
AVG

 Avast
Firewall
Kerio(Direct Download) Zone Alarm

 If are using zone alarm it may slow your PC. Try Outpost Firewall http://www.agnitum.com/products/outpost or Sygate Firewall http://www.sygate.com/, both have FREE and Pro versions and are heads above ZA.
Misc.
IE Spyads SpywareBlaster Spyware Guard
Windows Update- you must keep updated, it is the start of a secure system-
get all CRITICAL Updates

Things you want(Still Free)
 

  I use Firefox PR1 and IMHO, beats the sox off MS Explorer. Life is good with tabs. Click the link and give it a try.

Ad-Aware
Spybot S&D

SpywareBlaster
MS MVP Hosts file

Mike Lin's Homepage and get the Startup Control Panel and Startup Monitor tools.

 

The best forum for malware removal:

 http://forums.spywareinfo.com/index.php?s=262d844129208feb8b0cf5b0186a32f6&act=SC&c=4
SWI Forums--

[happydogdesign]

Dealing with Spyware and Adware

[Riley]

Lots of good tools mentioned here, but I have found that cautions are in order with two of them:

1. Hijack This! will cheerfully allow you to remove things you might want to keep. I have the Microsoft 'View Partial Source' applet installed for example. It appears in the scan that HT does- as do a lot of things that I have installed on purpose. If you just remove everything that it presents you with, you might lose some little extras that you like and wanted to keep. Take your time and kill off the stuff that doesn't belong there, rather than taking a blanket approach.

2. AVG is pretty good as an antivirus, but I am not convinced that it will always remove what it finds. I have seen systems that had viruses that an up-to-date AVG install couldn't clean. Other measures had to be taken to remove the infection.
What I do like about AVG is that it has a very small system resource footprint. It doesn't lag your system out like the Big Two tend to. And it isn't constantly squawking for more money.
Does anybody have any good info on the effectiveness of the paid version of AVG?

[Brett66]

I ran into such a Trojan a year or so ago, I also discovered the ultimate cure for it:

Firefox

[Lancey Howard]

Webroot's Spy Sweeper is great.