Unless you have been living in cave or love troubleshooting you run firewall and virus programs. Additionally, you might also run anti-spamware and spybot programs. The chink in this cyber armor is the user, in this case, me.
I surfed around for free photoshop filters to try. Somewhere, wish like heck I could remember where so none of you end up there, the little box came up with WARNING!!! WARNING!! Will Robinson! There are two tiny circles to click to acknowledge your choice of action. In this case: allow or disallow. As I tried to get the browser to close and exit the evil place I had happened upon the little box kept coming up. I clicked the tiny circle in front of disallow/block so many times my head spun. Well, somewhere in this fast moving oh my gosh situation I missed. Yup, I hit the ok before I clicked the circle ( I think this is what happend anyway). The screen went crazy splashes of screens openning before my eyes. Stop oh stop click click augh!!! Turn off the modem and cross my fingers – I know I am in deep poo.
Virus Alert! Virus Alert – potential attack – trojan – warning WARNING WILL ROBINSON!! You ARE F’d.
After the virus protection and firewall all settled down I was left with what can only be called pure EVIL. A trojan that hides in the bowels of the registry ( in four places at least) and does nothing but load other trojans and malware and toolbars and browser hijacker . … just about anything you do not want in the way of software. This insidous little monster can not download anything else because the firewall and virus scan catch the attempt as I ever so carefully click the correct circle. But, every so often a fake virus warning comes up with a blinking icon similar to my virus scans in the systems tray. If ya click it you go to a web page that promotes some scan package – never the same one either! Open any Adobe product and here we go again.
Now if I were trying to steal something I would say hey ya get what ya get but this was just a free demo for some photoshop filters!
Ad-Aware can’t find it. McAffe is stopping all new attempts (I hoped). Free scanners can find it but you have to pay to delete it LOL what a rip. How many of the free scanners that can identify this sucker but will only delete it if you pay for it promote the darn thing in the first place? You have to wonder. Well there are good free programs out there that will scan, detect, and delete but, each one of them seems to miss something or other. So, I now have, along with my McAffe full suit of security tools, Ad-Aware, SUPERAntiSpyWare, and the online free scan and removal tool at Ewido.com.
Count as of now:
2 trojan toolbars
189 Malware Adware MyWay
23 trojan media codec
The consequences of the wrong button.
If you are only using one spyware program I suggest you get another one to go along with it. The average full scan of my system here took an hour – hey – I have lots of stuff! Then I disabled the windows restore, restarted, and rescanned. So this has cost me most of my afternoon and evening.
I also am left wondering if my roomates computer started all this because I have been informed that for an unknown reason it is announcing that McAfee is no longer protecting it and has expired. I know it is not expired as it is my package that I just renewed in August because all the computer in the household are on my wireless network to share my internet connection. My laptop downstairs seems fine. Hopefull this is a coincidence as it has happened on that particular computer before – I just chalked it up to lack of enough memory and processor capacity. Ummm ………
