Sunday, July 31, 2005

The Perfidy of Spyware

All right, here's an appeal to the software geeks out there. Friday night, after I clicked on an ill-advised webpage, a huge flock of adware/spyware - and one Trojan virus - settled onto my computer and proceeded to wreak havoc. Grrr. (No, I didn't agree to download something - I'm not that stupid. It just leapt on me. I wasn't wearing a short skirt or anything.)

Now, after many, many tedious scans and sweeps with Norton and Spysweeper and Ad-Aware and SpyBot Search and Destroy, I've quarantined and deleted nearly all of the offending parties. But there is one thing, though, that keeps popping up and throwing SpySweeper into a panic. It's something called "system service62". Every time I reboot - and there's been a lot of rebooting in the last 36 hours - up pops SpySweeper telling me oh, oh, oh this is something bad. But whatever it is, it craftily evades our attempts to isolate and kill it. Thanks a bunch, SpySweeper, you're a regular Cassandra.

What is this and why is it freaking out one of my spyware program ? I've googled it, but found nothing comprehensible. I've checked with these guys and they don't recognize it. But it seems like it's something nasty, because while I think I've mostly got things under control, there are still some little glitches that make me think there's some funny stuff lurking under rocks. I'm definitely running a little slow, and something keeps changing my desktop background, re-arranging my icons, and resetting my IE* home page to MSN.com, all of which is highly annoying.

Suggestions? Other than "get a Mac" or "get Linux" which aren't helpful at the moment.

(*Yes, I should try a different browser, yeah yeah yeah... Up until this moment it's not been an issue, okay?)

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