Thursday, August 05, 2004

Spyware

I spent most of yesterday afternoon cleaning up my brother's laptop after it was infected by a spyware virus that hijacked his Internet Explorer. Everytime I try to load the home page (espn.com) it takes me to some friggin other page. After several frustrating hours, I consulted a few computer experts. Zobo suggsted Spybot Seacrh and Destroy in addition to CWS Shredder. Both Al Can't Hang and HDouble endorsed Ad Ware 6.0. That was pretty solid. I suggest you install the free download and ran it at least once a week.

OK, so I ran all there programs... and I found over 100 nasty bits of adware and spyware. Unreal, huh? And I removed all of them... except the nasty little bugger... the trojan strain that hijacked IE!! I downloaded Mozilla, because IE really is prone to attacks. Man, in a short time period I quickly got familiarized with the different attacks a computer is bombarded with... and the scary part was that different sites installed tracking programs that traced every website his computer visited. All of those are gone, and say goodbye to IE.

Thanks again to Zobo, ACH, and HDouble for sharing their computer knowledge!

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