Mrs_Stiffler said:
My computer has been hijacked by something warning me of spyware and asking me to go to one of several links to purchase spyware killer software by credit card. It keeps resetting itself as my home page. I can't even access the McAfee update feature to look for anything on there. It even interferes with many websites, although this one works fine.
Any advice?
There are a number of variants out there that hijack your browser. As a rule they are not dangerous to your system simply because their goal is to direct you to sites that sponsors have paid to have you visit. So they are not like viruses that are out to kill your system and if they become too noticable then the user will make an effort to remove them which defeats their purpose.
The problem is that usually a system that is vulnerable to one will catch many and then the performance goes to shit. I have rarely seen just one browser redirecter on a system, there is almost always a few and given the conflicts that the browser experiences the system typically dies while browsing.
Fixing is hard because some of the parasitic operants may combine virus and/or spyware components to rebuild themselves. Ie: you kill the spyware and the virus portion goes out on the next reboot to bring back the spyware and visa versa. Sometimes the only 'practical' solution is to do a re-install of the system unless you are very confident in playing with the registry and playing with the system.
Now that said here is the basics:
1. Firewall, you need one because if you still have the contaminent on your system it will try to call out to the mothership for support and the firewall will block it, which of course also tells the actual program that is perpetuating your problem.
2. Virus checker, (you have one from the sounds of it), run it regularly, ie: every night.
3. No one Spyware product will ever suffice. I don't know if it is because Spyware is a lesser known issue and thus the resources are not applied to it as they are to anti-virus programs but for whatever reason there is no one 'great' spyware program out there. At this point the best combination is Ad-Aware 6 and Spybot Search & Destroy. Between them they will catch nearly everything.
4. Do not install other spyware programs other than those two as many actually ARE spyware.
5. Make sure your security levels are high in IE.
6. Maybe change to Opera? It isn't that Opera is less prone to be hacked but much like MACs the market share is so small that the jerks who create this shit don't tend to bother with it.
7. NEVER install Kazaa or any variants of Kazaa.
8. Regularly look at your process list. Get an idea what is normally running such that if something funny like "Bridge" shows up then you can run a check on the process to see if it should be there.
Good luck.
T.
