Re: OT - Win XP .. http://www.safer-networking.org/ SPYBOT !!!!!!

Phil S. wrote:
"John King" <kingsx@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:INPbg.79589$H71.44957@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Phil S. wrote:
"ian field" <dai.ode@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:u_Ibg.5008$M94.1774@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"wb" <b24warbabySpamMeAga@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:1148141844.484467.255420@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I'm not going to read all these replies.

If you haven't installed SPyBot, it shows and
cures all that annoying *** web fuckers do to your machine,
including startup ***.

http://www.safer-networking.org/

IT IS FREE FREE FREE .. None of that FREE to scan but $20 to fix ***.

UPDATED WEEKLY

TURN ON ALL AUTOMATIC UPDATES AND YOUR NEVER HAVE ASSHOLES '***'ch'
with
YOUR BOX .

Having just downloaded spybot from the link you posted, I've installed it and so far every time I've tried to run it I've had to invoke Program Manager with ctrl/alt/del because the program is "not responding"!

Never had this problem with Lavasoft Adaware.

Try uninstall/reinstall. I find that both programs are needed. While there is much overlap, there exceptions, as well. Neither one picks up everything, but between the two you get much better coverage.

Run Adaware and clean up from what it finds. Follow with Spybot. You will be amazed at how much stuff Spybot picks up the first time it runs.

BTW, I've never had any trouble with either program.
I've also used both with good success, but they're still no
guarantee that they'll remove *anything* that a nasty site
can put on your machine. Example:

A couple of weeks ago I went to the TV network ABC's site,
you can guess the URL. I wanted to watch a past episode of
a program I'd missed. It didn't want to play from Firefox,
so I opened IE (mistake #1) and then I let them have active x
permissions (mistake #2). My machine immediately started
showing phony but serious "warning" screens and directing me
to another site to download an "update."

I knew it was BS, and went right to running Adware and Spy Bot.
Neither of them nor my anti-virus could get or remove it.
Come to find out it was a nasty little bugger of Malware called:
Spy Sheriff, and they try to strong arm / hustle you into buying
their crappy anti spyware proggie.

After surfing the net as increasingly slower speeds, I found
info that their malware was so deeply embedded into the registry
and all over the system, that it was nearly impossible to get
rid of without *buying* a third party utility to remove it. On
free download detected most of the files and registry entries,
and I had step by step instruction of how to remove it manually;
piece by piece, but even that didn't work.

Lucky for me I had a recent backup, and made another just in case,
they I nuked my whole system with fdisk and reloaded from scratch.
That was a half day spent trying to get rid of their stinking malware,
and a whole day reloading my system!!!

However, I've mentioned before that I have a tendency to "empty the box"
every so often anyway, so I just did it a bit ahead of schedule.
Now my system is nice and clean, *all* old piled up crap gone from both
drives (5 partitions) and my system is back to it's good old stable
self.

I was under the impression that you could do a roll back with a system restore (XP) and it we effectively reinstall an old registry not aflicted by the badware. Then you could simply delete the offending files. One problem is that some of these guys set up fetch beacons that are very hard to kill. This is where the store bought registry mechanic is needed. As you note, John, never give Active X permission unless you are sure about it. And when it won't run in Firefox, the next best thing is to try another non-IE browser, including Netscape (uses Mozilla engine) and Opera. IE is brower of last resort.

Did I mention that you can try Windows Defender, a free download from Microsoft? It picks up stuff the other two don't. I was suspicious at first, but a friend assured me it is OK and so far, it hasn't been a problem.

Sorry you had all that trouble. You ought to lodge a complaint with ABC, not that you'll get any satisfaction from them.



Unfortunately, with W2K I can't "roll back" though I did have
a backup of my registry settings to fall back on, but even
that and file removal wasn't enough to get rid of this baby.
Somehow it kept replicating itself. One real nasty habit it
had was making ctrl+alt+del to your task manager blank out
and non-functional. I finally got it stopped with that "Kill
it all" proggie, and did my regedit and file removal; rebooted
and it still came back from the dead. That's when I gave up
and figured it was gonna take more time to fix it than to
just nuke it.

I thought about giving ABC a hard time about it, but like you
say, it would only waste my time. Sheesh, You'd think you could
trust a big site like a major TV network, but NOOOoooOOO (said
in the vein of Steve Martin's famous shtick from the 70s SNL.)

No real biggie, as I said, I "dump the box" occasionally anyway.

Oh, I have recently added "defender" to my box, don't know that
it has prevented any problems yet though. And I've also gone back
to my old router that uses NAT, not that it would have helped
on this problem, but my paranoia level is kind of high now ;-).

Bottom line, as you said: I never should have let them have
any machine control, but I really wanted to see that episode...
You can bet your ass that I won't be screwing around with ABC
again soon.

John
.