Timewaster's Guide Archive
General => Rants and Stuff => Topic started by: fuzzyoctopus on April 18, 2004, 12:43:57 PM
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So I really don't know what to do. I've never had problems with this before.
When I left the house yesterday about 4, I had one IE window open, and I believe it was on my Yahoo inbox. When I got back at 6:30, I had twelve windows open, and three things had downloaded THEMSELVES onto my computer.
I am royally pissed. So the first thing I do is shut down IE. The second thing I do is uninstall the three programs, once I find them. Then I run AdAware and get to remove 120 items. Fun times!
But I've still missed something, because I'm still getting crap from IE, the settings on my browser are seriously screwed up, and I'll get pop ups every hour or so.
So J.T. goes through my registry files and deletes a lot of crap that shouldn't be there. Still didn't fix it. Gah.
Other than never using IE again, and sticking soley to Opera, (which I'm tempted to do, because IE is a piece of crap), what can I do?
Help?
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Have J.T. go through your regestry again and look through those files he deleated. Sometimes the programs reinstall themselfs into the regestery if you delete them. If that's happening just google the name of the file and you should easly beable to find a free program to fix your problem.
And I'm not even going to go into whats wrong with your statment about only useing Oprea.
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Opera doesn't pull this kind of excrement on me.
Opera has pop-up blocker built in.
Opera doesn't shut down if you open more than 6 windows.
And thank you for the very helpful info. I'll try that.
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And I'm not even going to go into whats wrong with your statment about only useing Oprea.
What part of the above statment don't you understand?
And your welcome.
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I hate spyware, those b'stards. Mind you thats a nice thing about mac... the stuff can try to install itself... but right now it cant work.
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http://www.safer-networking.org/index.php?page=mirrors
Download the program there. It's very useful, and easy to use. It's a spyware and adware destroying program.
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Im wary of those programs as well, many of them were created by the same people who made the other malware and in many cases they bring their own spyware to the table.
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Ditto. For example, one of the programs that downloaded itself is a thing called Purity Scan. It's supposed to find hidden porn on your computer. Ooo! But it also gives you regular popup ads too. I didn;t want any of it- but sprig was right and I found a thing that removes it.
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I've used this one for about a year and I haven't had any trouble with it.
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I'll give it a go after we clean out the registry a bit, if I'm still having problems. Thanks.
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I havn't used Opera mysef, but I use Mozilla, and if Opera isn't IE, it has to be good.
There's one other thing you can try with a browser switch that often helps (Helps you that is, not the computer):
Leave an IE icon on the desktop, and rename it "Piece of **** 4.0" (That's what I did)
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That link he gave is one to follow. I can vouch for the program myself. So can SE.
And i use IE. I liked it more with the Avant upgrade. Added stuff like tabs, popup blockers etc. Plus its still IE - other browsers tend to have compatibility issues with some websites.
Your choice though :)
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Well things seem to be better.
We found that among the spyware I'd also gotten a virus, which is always fun. the Peper virus, which I'd never heard of.
*shrug*
And I do like having two browsers. What doesn't work in one invariably works in the other.
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well also make sure you have the latest windows updates, since it sounds like you could have had some hole that got exploited, like the RPC hole that blaster went through.
but yeah...I'm happy on my mac too...
My friend has some piece of malware on his computer that isn't known about by any of the adaware type things he tries. It is a little annoying but benign in his case; it has no adverse effect on anything he does. It's some sort of thing where if he goes to a website with a form that has a field named "URL" it will stick some sort of picked-from-a-list url into that field whenever the form gets submitted. Specifically when he's uploading torrents to scarywater, these urls show up on the page where you can edit the page the visitors see...but since the URL field only becomes active for torrents not hosted on scarywater, and all the ones he uploads are hosted on it, the page viewers never see these spurious links at all, so they do nothing except add a bit of clutter to the page only staff can see.
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uhm... I've actually not heard of that program before, so I cannot/will not, in fact, be vouching for it.
It has, in fact, been my experience that OS utilities other than a simple firewall or virus checker are for the most part extremely damaging to your system. Ad Aware is different, and I've seen some popup blockers that are pretty good though, but anythig scan as you guy sets off alarm bells in my head.
One thing about installing, NEVER EVER check teh "always trust content from..." no matter what the company listed is. if this window never pops up, change your IE settings to make it ask.
Safe computing practice will protect you from problems like this. You don't have to change from IE or to a Mac to do it.
Oh, and IE is just fine. I wonder about the complaints I hear about it. "More than 6 windows" is ridiculous. I have an old computer (300 mmx, I think) running WinXP, and on top of all my other programs, i often have as many as 2 dozen browser windows open or more. And it never hurts my performance.
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I've found I can get by with 3 or 4 programs for regular maintence and protection.
1. Zonealarm. Awesome Firewall.
2. Regcleaner - used to be free, now no longer free. Great for cleaning out the registry.
3. Ad-Aware
4. Occaisionally, Norton Antivirus 2003, about once every 6 months.
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urk... conniption forming.
run your damn AV more than once every 6 months or expect any email you send me to be deleted unread.
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Yeah that like saying I sterilize every sixth needle or wear a condom for every sixth girl.
Not that im advocating drug use or loose premarital sex...
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I have a question about antiviral, actually. My Norton has never never never found anything. I installed McAfee a few weeks ago (free from my DSL provider) and it started to interfere with all sorts of processes, which it shouldn't. I was able to run it once and it found one virus and a trojan horse. Cleaned it out, but had to uninstall McAfee for the computer to run right again. What's up with that? Why didn't Norton catch it? I run Norton once a week, right after it downloads the new virus definitions, and it's on autoprotect all the time, but I worry that it's been disabled somehow.
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There was an article about it in Wired a while ago... what I understood is that the New Malware falls in a grey area that few companies have programmed for since they actually take advantage of using backdoors and loopholes in the windows programming (a good example is spyware), whats more a lot of new viruses actually attack Norton or Macaffee and disable them you can think of them as the AIDS of the computing world.
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Becaue certian viruses can effectively hide themselfs from virus scanners. I actualy had one once that disabled my norton. Also if you don't ever update your virus definitions (via subscription) you might as well not have it installed. McAfee is a better AV then Norton, but they charge a lot more for a yearly subscription (on adverage it's 3 times more then Norton).
As for interfering with Processes, all AV programs do that. There are allwayse some programs that don't get along with AVs. It's just something you have to live with.
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Right, but when it makes the computer shut down, and doesn't allow it to ever completely boot up, there's a problem. It only booted up once in about ten tries.
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It's either you have some virus on your PC that donsen't like the program, or your PC's configuration donsen't. It happenes, all be it not very often.
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I use F-Secure myself. It's worked quite nicely.
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SE, can you tell me more about it? I'd like to be sure there's nothing on my computer. My roommate just had to have hers wiped because she had a backdoor virus that couldn't be cleaned. She lost everything.
(Speaking of which, I should spend my day off today backing up! It's Marathon Monday--Patriots Day--here in Mass. I'm going downtown later to watch some friends cross the finish line.)
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http://www.f-secure.com/
A one year renewal of virus definition updates are ~$40. The program itself is $60 and includes a year of updates. if you leave it online and let it auto-update, it'll do that pretty much daily.
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http://www.wired.com/news/infostructure/0,1377,62222,00.html
Heres a nice primer from wired on how to cheaply protect your computer
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http://www.abisoft.net/documents/DefendingAgainstaTrojanHorse.pdf and heres some stuff by Abisoft for defending against trojans
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This is the best though from Information Security magazine...
http://infosecuritymag.techtarget.com/2002/may/combatingmalware.shtml
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Ah, i must have thought SE liked spybot S&D, when he meant Adaware. It's all Gemms fault.
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Well, I use Norton AV 20-o-4. As well I use Adaware. They both work perfectly fine for me. They both find things, kill them and thats about the half of it. Some time ago, February I believe, I had a virus that just started killing all my applications. Whenever I tried to run anything, it wouldn't work because the shortcuts were bad or something or other.
And nothing is my fault. It would be in the best interest of ones self to say it was your own fault for listening to someone else. Another reason why critics are lame (not that I'm saying those that write reviews for TWG here are lame).
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I still blame Gemm.
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I still don't know what I did. And this is usually how I get the blame for something. I guess I just have scapegoat hovering around myself like I'm some sort of prize winning scape.
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no, you ARE the scapegoat.
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Thanks for the info guys.
It looks like I've got a virus on my secondary drive. I partioned my 12GB into two separate drives, and I'm very greatful that I did. I don't have an AV right now because of $$ and the problem stacer is having with MacAffee. Looks like F-Secure could solve my problems.
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If you need an AV, MoD, you're on BYU campus, right? You can get one for free off of BYU's website (because BYU is tired of having so many viruses coursing through the intranet, they're offering one for free.)
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Oh cool!! Thanks Brenna. :)