The Spyware War

[captain_slinky]

I have one particular bit of spyware on my computer that is particularly nasty. Spybot, Adaware, and a fistfull of other Spyware Removal Programs can't even find it. It's not in my start-up programs, it's not in my running processes. But for some reason, occasionally (and sporadically) I'll get a trio of pop-ups out of nowhere. Mild fare, too... 888poker.com, Refinance Mortgage, etc. The *oddest* thing about it is that even though I am using Firefox, the pop-ups pop up in IE. And weirder than that? I have completely uninstalled Internet Explorer (or so I had thought)!!! No rhyme or reason as to when or why the pop-ups come, they just do.

My latest victory in this battle has been that when these pop-ups *do* find their way in, IE performs an illegal opperation and needs to be shut down (makes sense, considering that IE isn't on this computer), so I never actually SEE the pop-ups any more, but they do take an awfully big bite out of my resources till they error out.

Comments

[hallerlake.livejournal.com]

Does it happen when you're browsing? Doing email? MSN Messenger? Or do you just come back to the computer and find there's a bunch of popups?

[captain-slinky.livejournal.com]

That's what's odd... no pattern! Maybe once out of every 5 times I open Firefox it happens. Once out of every ten times I click on a link in Firefox it happens. Never when i open a link in a new tab. Once every 3 days or so they'll have just popped up while nothing was open on my computer at all.

The only common denominator I have been able to detect is that the computer was *on* each time I got the pop-ups.

Go figure!

[nani-ka.livejournal.com]

cruise your processes (if this is xp) looking for stuff named like "spiffygambling.exe" or whatever. I've tracked stuff down that way before.

[captain-slinky.livejournal.com]

Did that... even spent an evening Googling EVERY SINGLE PROCESS running on the computer and removing anything that was even remotely "iffy". Still there :(

[zannah.livejournal.com]

what version of windows are you using? sounds like your messenger service might be enabled.

[captain-slinky.livejournal.com]

WinXP. Haven't *seen* any messengers an any of the processes, but maybe I'm not looking for the right stuff?

[lunachik72.livejournal.com]

have you tried spy sweeper from webroot.com yet??? it's the best program *ever* :D

[captain-slinky.livejournal.com]

Is it free?

[nani-ka.livejournal.com]

mragh. bad, bad spyware. FFR!