Spyware/Trojan Hell!

I have just come out from the pits of spyware/trojan hell and come out alive! For years I’ve grown reckless and thought myself invincible from all things that newbies get. They get it, not me, I’m too l33t. That changed today when a simple install from my neighborhood P2P network installs a bajillion trojans and adware software on my computer.

The first thing I noticed was being prevented from running Task Manager or the Run command. Something had to be wrong and so I downloaded Spybot Search & Destroy. True enough, I had a million things already installed on computer. I proceeded to have Spybot fix the problems and it wanted me to restart to get rid of programs it couldn’t delete. A million restarts later and Spybot was still nowhere near to success. It removed some, but certainly not all. I installed Avast Anti-Virus and it also deleted a million more pieces of spyware and trojans, but there were still applications that hi-jacked Windows and prevented me from accessing my beloved Task Manager using a registry key meant for legitimate uses … gone bad.

I found my answer in HijackThis. It showed me a list of programs that hooks themselves into Windows like leeches and removes them. It worked great, but it still couldn’t remove the SurfSideKick(GO FUG YOURSELF!) adware that kept coming up. I couldn’t delete the SSK folder at all because it was always being used and it always returned no matter how many registry keys I deleted.

In comes File Unlocker … a neat little tool that shuts down the programs using said file and makes sure they are unused so I can freely delete them. It turns out, the programs that were using the files were Windows Explorer and Firefox. What is the world coming to when Firefox is no longer safe? tsk tsk. I even had ads served up to me in Firefox windows. The only safe refuge seems to be Opera which thankfully became free just a few months ago. In any case, File Unlocker allowed me to delete the files and presto! One more run of Spybot and I come screeching to the present writing this.

So ends my adventure … hours lost … lessons learned … and pissed off.