Another day, another cleanup. This morning’s cleanup was described by a new customer like this: “It’s broken. We can’t run our customer database program. The night staff keeps surfing the internet, and loading spyware, so that’s probably it.” What I found was a computer that, on first look, had shortcuts to software on a drive [...]
The newest security issue for Windows is the WMF hole. First, a little history. WMF is the acronym for a Windows Meta File. That’s an old graphics format, vector style. Vector art is drawn by the computer, based on code in the file. (The other kind of graphics is a bitmap, like JPG.) Of course, [...]
I had what was apparently a pretty bad infestation of spyware crud on my Win XP box. Aurora, Limewire, some other stuff. I couldn’t clean it out myself, gave up, and got a referral on a local tech guru. He showed up, took one look, and said he had to take the system to the [...]
Did another spyware cleanup today. User reported that a spyware cleanup tool appeared immediately after running Windows Update. Guess: the update process changes some Internet Explorer settings back to defaults (known), and at that point, a third-party toolbar sitting in the “c:\winnt\downloaded program files” was able to run a delayed install. Moral of the story: [...]
Yes, indeed. Very clever, these spyware authors. Working on a cleanup, found a spyware component, turned out to be part of Aurora, that the usual cleanup tools could find, but only could remove on restart. Restarted, and amazingly, it’s gone. Only not; it has a new name. Seems this one randomly renames itself on shutdown, [...]
