A coworker just got a super-evil spyware program. It was throwing up popups
all over and even opened his CDROM drives to show him its awesome power
and get him to buy their “spyware cleaner”. I suggested he run
Spybot immediately.
We have Norton Antivirus at work and it did nothing.
One thing you can look for is, under Control Panel->Add/Remove Programs,
see if you have ShopAtHome Agent. If so, run spybot. (If you try to
uninstall SAHagent from control panel, it will lie and say it’ll be gone by
the next reboot.) You should
run spybot anyway. Did I mention spybot? I seem to do that a lot.
Grrr, the web is getting so evil.
update: Now his system was using 100% of system resources. A sysadmin
came and ran Adaware
(the other reputable spyware remover) on his machine and it’s working now.
I finally got around to installing
virus protection
on all our comps
at home. Found a couple of minor viruses. And then there was the spyware.
I hadn’t scanned the auxiliary computer in a while and it had
aquired the rather nasty SAHagent spyware as well as something else. Ran
Spybot
and did some manual cleanup. I finally got around to
questioning all the running processes on that computer and cleaning
them up and it actually shuts down properly now.