I’ve been having some strange things happening with my Windows box lately, so I decided to run Ad-Aware to see if I’ve got any spyware running in the background. Sure enough, a staggering number of malicious bits of code were found on my system. But even after I ran Ad-Aware to destroy everything, and switched the default browser on that machine to Firefox, random ads were still popping up. So I downloaded Microsoft’s AntiSpyware beta, and that found even more stuff. Oy. I don’t know if this is somehow related to all the problems I’ve been having with games lately, but it certainly can’t be helping.
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Well if it makes you feel any better, the whole world feels your pain. There really is nothing like turning on you computer to find that coolwebsearch has taken over your browser and is sending you to god knows where. Add to that, a few dataminer’s that log all the sites you visit and you’ve got a party.
If your interested, one of the handlers at the internet storm center wrote a little thing called “Follow The Bouncing Malware”. Its just a little experiment he did with an unpatched winxp machine. If you’ve got the time its a interesting read.
Part 1
http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?date=2004-07-23
Part 2
http://isc.sans.org/diary.php?date=2004-08-23
Part 3
http://isc.sans.org//diary.php?date=2004-11-04
I use Spybot Search & Destroy, as well as Ad-Aware. I just added the MS beta to the mix. I generally run my spyware stuff once a week and, so far, I’ve been lucky. If I had to pick one of the three it would
be Spybot S&D but everybody has their own preferences.
And sometimes I just bang my head until computer problems don’t bother me.