Nasty stuff
 

A friend of mine was asking if I could take a look at his computer, complaining it was runnning extremely slow and IE was crashing every single time he trie to go somewhere on it. I was baffled to see IE had LOADS of toolbars, some senseless like "The Cash Toolbar!" and much much more. I instantly solved the cause of his misery... spyware installed by all the p2p programs he had.

I downloaded ad-aware, ran it, and.... 502 items found!! Not to mention about 100 something processes running. I also installed Opera so he wouldnt have to use IE, but now here comes the problem... even though the p2p programs have been completely removed, spyware still shows up!! I found 15 items when I ran it again, and running adaware immediately after deleting those found 3 items. Something called New .NET (some tie in with Microsoft .NET?). Although I want to move him to Linux, he's not computer literate and uses several programs I think he'd have a hard time migrating to linux.

Anyone have any idea what this spyware that keeps reinstalling itself is coming from?

Try also running Spybot Search and Destroy - it provides full explanations of where all the bits are (reg, c:\, \winnt\ etc) and classes them by how bad they are. It also says what they are. I find that running Ad-Aware/Ad_Watch all the time, with a clean once a month by Spybot, keeps the system clean.

Does your friend also have a decent up to date virus guard/firewall? If not, free ones are AVG (www.grisoft.com) and Zonealarm (www.zonelabs.com).

Good luck.

ps. have you thought about restricting your friend's acces? maybe not let him install things - it's for his own good!!!

i had a problem with that new.net crap when i used kazaa/morpheus. i don't remember how i got rid of it tho. i think there was a registry key starting/reinstalling it.

right now tho, i'm having some trouble with some nastier spyware - xupiter. i've tried adaware to delete it but without it i get page cannot be displayed for every web page i go to, can't connect to get e-mail, and can't get on msn/aim. i can't wait to get my linux box back up and running. till then, anyone have any ideas?:confused:

I use kazaalite in windows, It has the spyware removed.

xupiter is d*mn EVIL! Its stupendously hard to get rid of.
I eventually just threw caution to the wind and completely re-installed my folks's windows to escape it (after some severe lectures on net safety and lobbying to move them to linux...in vain).

Reinstall, get rid of it all and start from the beginning.

as much useless crap as there is on this computer i would love to just start over. however, it's a 4 year old compaq(parent's computer) and the recovery disk has disappeared and my 98se disk looks like it was attacked by some 80 grit sandpaper and i have no idea how that happened because as far as i know it hasn't left it's jewel case in at least 1 year. oh well, quick google search turned up some people as annoyed with xupiter as i am and they had a tool for deleting and it appears it worked.

Oh yeah.. and what was all the "possible browser hijack attempt" warnings I got when I ran adaware?

I am also curious... how long will it be before spyware is classified as virii?

You do know that adaware counts a lot of cookies as spyware?

Xupiter has an uninstall page with simple, easy to use uninstall instructions! :D

www.xupiter.com/uninstall.html