Dang Spyware Crap

Posted on October 30, 2005 No Comments

I swear, if death-penalty for spyware and malware authors ever came up for vote, we’d all see what a hard-liner I could be…

Spent well over an hour at client’s place today wrestling with some stupid “WinFixer” popups. Well, the machine had lots of other stuff going on, but even after I thought it was clean, suddenly the winfixer popups started again. /sigh. Then I got her McAfee updated (something turned off the updates… ain’t that lovely?). Once that was current, McAfee started having complete cows about the thing. You could hear it saying, “OMG! Get if off, get it off!!!”.

Well, a cursory Google search told me I should do more than 5 minutes of research. Saw too many Hijack This! logs and a couple differing answers on how to “cure.” That made me a bit nervous. I promised the client a return visit in a day or two and headed home to figure this critter out.

Turns out that this is Virtumundo (no, I will NOT hyperlink to their site) causing all this fun. A bit of digging turned up two links, the first of which refers to the second. If you stumble into this pile of crap, check first and second out.

Tags: spyware