Mobile Bay Reef Keepers

I was browsing the Dell forums today looking at topics on some of there new laptop lines when i saw something installing in the background. I pulled up my taskmanager and there were 5 spyware programs running that were not there yesterday. One was wupdater.exe which is a horrible one. Processor utilization was at 100 percent and savenow and wupdater were killing it all. Now since i know my machine was clean yesterday and i was in a reputable forum i am thinking that someones signature had some malicious code in it. Just an FYI. It was easy to clean out and i needed to do some spring cleaning anyway.

How could you tell it was installing?
What do you do for spring cleaning?

I have come to 100% rely on an almost-daily running of Ad-Aware to keep spy-ware away.

I could see a window minimized on the system tray and then it went away. Then another popped up and minimized. During the process there was alot of hard drive activity. During a 60 second cycle 4 different hard hitter spyware were installed. Also i had a nice search bar on my IE when it was done.

I'm actually getting to the point where Ilove the creativity of spyware sharers. Granted you probally got some pretty nasty stuff in the process, but if you did get it fornm a sig on the site you have to give props for someone doing that.


so heres an on topic but off topic ? for you Kev.

When I run SpyBot it freezes half way through. IS it a RAm problem or what? if you know of course.

-A

How long have you actually let it sit ? Alot of programs will appear to be frozen and not actually be in a locked state. Personally i have always been more of an Adaware fan. Spybot can actually do damage to legitimate programs from what i have seen in the past.

snoopdog wrote: Also i had a nice search bar on my IE when it was done.

That happened to mine a few weeks ago. It must have downloaded it when Nikki was using the computer. When I got home there was a mountain range picture behind my IE buttons. It took a while to find, but I did get rid of it.

I recently upgraded my RAm and fired up SpyBot. It got to the stall part and left the house to go to Sunday dinner with the folks. Came back about 3 hours later. Still frozen. Oh well...no biggie. AdAware does just fine.

Personally do no like spybot, but opinions are just that. Might want to trim your Msconfig if you have not already done it. Adaware only gets rid of spyware and adware, there are alot of anoyances it does not touch like these anoying ass search bars.

have you tried this:

http://housecall.trendmicro.com/

seems to find a lot of stuff

Yeah that is what we use at work, but the corporate version. Kind of a PIA because on our computers you cannot turn it off and it updates from the corporate side and you might as well leave your machine when it is doing a scan. The housecalls program is awesome because you can scan someones computer from the web without even doing an install, very cool

The best I've found is Webroot Spy Sweeper. It seems to find tons of stuff that ad-aware doesn't. Also runs some resident programs that help prevent the junk from installing in the first place.

http://www.webroot.com/

I will have to try that.