Levonian
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This doesn’t really belong in General Chat, but I felt that it was too important to bury in one of the obscure technology forums, at least for now.
About a week ago I was attacked by two really nasty trojan horse/browser hijackers—about:blank and the aurora/nail.exe malwares. In addition, I already had the Paduaism trojan horse (another nasty one), and some other varmints such as eZula and Sidefind. As a result, using the Internet became almost impossible. As soon as I would open Internet Explorer, as many as 30 pop-up screens would open within a matter of seconds above, below, and around the browser window. Navigating anywhere became a nightmare, and usually the keyboard would freeze or the entire OS would lock up.
Over the course of the past few days, I have spent about 15 hours trying to get rid of these bastards. But despite my best efforts, nothing worked. These new trojan horses are in a league of their own, and the usual tools such as HijackThis, SpyBot, and Ad-aware are unable to do anything about them. I spent three straight days trying everything I could think of to manually remove these scumsucking leeches—I spent hours doing surgery on the Windows registry and combing through the System32 directory looking for any fresh executable code and/or .dll’s that I could find. Everything that was less than a week old went in the Recycle Bin. But nothing worked—as soon as I rebooted they would reincarnate themselves and all the changes I made to the registry were reversed.
However, I made two major breakthroughs—one the day before yesterday and one last night. The first breakthrough was finding a new malware remover called Adware Away. This thing really fucking works! It removed about:blank and aurora effortlessly. It’s about the same price as most of the other malware removers (about $30), but it was fully functional when I downloaded it, so I think it’s good old fashioned shareware—you’re on the honor system in terms of paying for it. It may have a time limit though—their web page doesn’t really make this clear. I’m going to write to them and find out, and I’m definitely going to send them a few bucks. As far as I can tell, my system is completely clean. First I ran Adware Away, and then I mopped up with HijackThis, SpyBot, and Ad-aware. All malware appears to be COMPLETELY GONE from my system. Bazooka is still detecting Sidefind, but as far as I can tell it is crippled and inoperative.
The second discovery I made, which is even more fundamental and important, is that all malware is written to run in Internet Explorer. The easiest way to get rid of the problem is just to DUMP INTERNET EXPLORER!!! As soon as I started using Firefox, all of my problems went away. I have been on the Internet for several hours now today, and I have not seen a single pop-up or page redirection. HijackThis can’t find anything on my system, and the only thing SpyBot can find is a few miscellaneous tracking cookies—no big deal. I’M CLEAN. And I’m very happy about it. I’ve got a lot of stuff to do today, but I felt that this was too important to not share with everybody, so I took the time to write this and post it up. Try everything I suggested—I guarantee it will work.
About a week ago I was attacked by two really nasty trojan horse/browser hijackers—about:blank and the aurora/nail.exe malwares. In addition, I already had the Paduaism trojan horse (another nasty one), and some other varmints such as eZula and Sidefind. As a result, using the Internet became almost impossible. As soon as I would open Internet Explorer, as many as 30 pop-up screens would open within a matter of seconds above, below, and around the browser window. Navigating anywhere became a nightmare, and usually the keyboard would freeze or the entire OS would lock up.
Over the course of the past few days, I have spent about 15 hours trying to get rid of these bastards. But despite my best efforts, nothing worked. These new trojan horses are in a league of their own, and the usual tools such as HijackThis, SpyBot, and Ad-aware are unable to do anything about them. I spent three straight days trying everything I could think of to manually remove these scumsucking leeches—I spent hours doing surgery on the Windows registry and combing through the System32 directory looking for any fresh executable code and/or .dll’s that I could find. Everything that was less than a week old went in the Recycle Bin. But nothing worked—as soon as I rebooted they would reincarnate themselves and all the changes I made to the registry were reversed.
However, I made two major breakthroughs—one the day before yesterday and one last night. The first breakthrough was finding a new malware remover called Adware Away. This thing really fucking works! It removed about:blank and aurora effortlessly. It’s about the same price as most of the other malware removers (about $30), but it was fully functional when I downloaded it, so I think it’s good old fashioned shareware—you’re on the honor system in terms of paying for it. It may have a time limit though—their web page doesn’t really make this clear. I’m going to write to them and find out, and I’m definitely going to send them a few bucks. As far as I can tell, my system is completely clean. First I ran Adware Away, and then I mopped up with HijackThis, SpyBot, and Ad-aware. All malware appears to be COMPLETELY GONE from my system. Bazooka is still detecting Sidefind, but as far as I can tell it is crippled and inoperative.
The second discovery I made, which is even more fundamental and important, is that all malware is written to run in Internet Explorer. The easiest way to get rid of the problem is just to DUMP INTERNET EXPLORER!!! As soon as I started using Firefox, all of my problems went away. I have been on the Internet for several hours now today, and I have not seen a single pop-up or page redirection. HijackThis can’t find anything on my system, and the only thing SpyBot can find is a few miscellaneous tracking cookies—no big deal. I’M CLEAN. And I’m very happy about it. I’ve got a lot of stuff to do today, but I felt that this was too important to not share with everybody, so I took the time to write this and post it up. Try everything I suggested—I guarantee it will work.
Spyware and viruses are a major pain in the ass. Glad you eradicted the nasty shit off your hard drive.
People who write malware code are the scum of the universe. Last year my wife’s laptop was so infested with the crap that she had to take it to Best Buy to have the hard drive formatted. Cost her $80. I know it’s not ‘politically correct’ to advocate vigilante justice, but I secretly wish that somebody would take a couple of these assholes out and shoot them. Maybe it would scare the rest of them into going out and getting an honest job. What if all the problems I was having had occurred a couple of weeks earlier when I was working on my term papers? It would have really caused problems for me, because even MS Word was acting erratically, even if I didn’t have a browser window open. I was getting pop-ups in my word processor when I wasn’t even on the Internet!
Thanks for your help *Mwah* Hope no more pop-ups junks. :Ohno:
<--- me