This week I’m fixing an old Toshiba laptop that was loaded with spyware. It had all these spyware:
- Adware BHO Generic
- Win32 Trojan PSW Sinowal
- Win32 clowsd
- Alexa Related
- Microsoft Windows Security Center Virus Override
- Microsoft Windows Security Center Firewall Override
- Microsoft Windows Security Center SP2 Update Override
- Microsoft Security Center _disabled
- PWS LDPinch IE
- SC Keylogger
- Smitfraud – C.generic
- Win32. Alphabet.ap
- Win32. BHO.je
The laptop actually had more than this but I didn’t write them down before I got rid of them. I used these three anti-spyware applications to get rid of the spyware: Ad-aware SE Personal, Spybot, and Spyware Doctor (my new favorite anti-spyware, although it’s not free.)
The fascinating spyware I love to hate, is one that places a program in the Startup. Everytime I tried to run AVG anti-virus, the spyware would start this:
HKLM…Run:[KernelFaultCheck] %systemroot%system32dumprep 0 -k
And immediately a system dump would begin with a blue screen of death and, I’d have to restart the computer without being able to run a virus scan.
The client and I decided to reinstall the operating system since she didn’t need anything on her harddrive. It’s an old laptop she uses for e-mail only. But normally I would have run all my anti-spyware tools, anti-virus (I prefer AVG), plus rootkit tools (see my rootkit post.) I like to get rid of spyware without reformatting, as most computer repair services do. They immediately reformat!!! Not Ducktoes. Ducktoes does anti-spy without data-fry!! So businesses and people can lose their spyware but keep their data. That’s what Ducktoes specializes in.
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