Spyware following spam into the enterprise

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Spyware is JUST as evil as a virus...

I've recently been pulled into doing some IT work for a company and the first thing I did was get them some protection. What I found on this network is simply astounding. I've seen machines utterly crippled by spyware/adware. One such machine is so badly compromised that ANY time you go to Trend Micro's freebie AV scan, it pops up no less than TWENTY-FIVE copies of an ad for some piece of crap AV product (The Shield suite). Now... ONE copy of an ad is only mildly annoying. TWO copies is enough to get me cross.. TWENTY FIVE copies is enough for me to wanna rip the bastard who wrote the spyware's head off with my bare hands. Needless to say, the Trend Micro site never really gets a chance to load with all the clock cycles and RAM being stolen by the routines that keep popping up more and more copies of that bloody ad.

What's worse, I've found that some of these programs hijack Google's output. I did a side-by-side search for AdAware by Lavasoft. The one infested by 180 Degree's spamware NEVER brought up the Lavasoft site - it brought up a bunch of sites that had NOTHING to do with the product. The "clean" one brought up the site as the first hit.

Cleaning the spamware out of a system can be pretty close to impossible. I've had a couple of Ad/spamware removers like AdAware, Bulletproofsoft, etc... run on those machines and crap STILL keeps popping up though in smaller doses.

On a couple of systems, I had no choice but to reinstall Windows from the factory restore discs. IE blew up with illegal operations after removing the 180 Degree garbage.

Ah well.. I'm billin' 'em by the hour...

Posted by: Wolfie2K3   Posted on: 06/01/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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