The Harkey Blog

Thursday, February 17, 2005

A colossal waste of time

I have spent a better portion of the past 24 hours combatting some nasty spyware/adware that somehow got installed on my desktop computer. And to top it all off, a trojan horse somehow got installed as well. After numerous attempts to eradicate it through AdAware and AVG Virus software, I think I've gotten it.

I HATE SPYWARE. I want God to punish those who propogate it. But only if it His will, of course ;)

In the process, I've made the jump over to Mozilla Firefox for my browser. Supposedly it is much less vulnerable than IE. So far so good.

posted by at 10:19 AM

5 Comments:

  • yeah, stick it out with Firefox. It is a little different at first, but it will grow on you. Check out some of the exstensions. ForcastFox is one of my favorites.

    By Blogger Jason, at 10:31 AM  

  • Jason, one problem I'm running into right now is that I can't do ftp with Firefox. How can I get to the ftp site?

    By Blogger Brett, at 10:45 AM  

  • I fielded about 15 calls this morning about an email virus that hit my company's email system. The tricky thing is that the email said this:

    "Your account has been used by a virus to spread throughout the company. Please use the attached instructions to clean up the virus."

    The email was signed by "Help Desk" and had a text file (containing the virus) attached. Sneaky jerks. Fooled a LOT of people with that one!

    By Blogger John Nelson, at 3:14 PM  

  • Yo Hark,

    Now would be a greeeeeat time to start backing your system up (if you don't already). Burn all your music to a DVD, save all your emails, address book, bookmarks, etc etc etc. I had a N-A-S-T-Y adware/spyware situation at my last job. I used AdAware and HijackThis to clean it (with some GREAT support from the AdAware support forums)....

    ... but, a month later, the computer crashed... I had a bad worm crawling through the system. Luckily, we backed up the entire system before it went.

    So, keep an eye on that stuff - run AdAware daily if you must. Also, enjoy FireFox... and if you're having trouble hitting FTP addresses, there's an FTP plug-in for firefox. Okay, I'm done. Bye.

    By Blogger Seth Gunderson, at 5:49 PM  

  • Thanks, Seth. That's outstanding advice that I will heed ASAP.

    By Blogger Brett, at 10:48 PM  

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