Thursday, April 1, 2004

My Little Boy is Growing Up (2 of 2)

A half hour later and, although no more viruses are found, four "suspect" programs -- all of them with the word "adware" in the title -- are discovered.  I delete them all.  Two of them were in a program folder from Lycos.  Now, there may have been something useful from Lycos on my computer, but *I* didn't put it there.  In fact, the little bastards were installed TODAY.  Seeing as everything I care about was installed on the computer BEFORE today (either by Dell or by me) I figure these buggers can be safely deleted.  (I also take a moment to consider whether it was really a good idea to not have a Firewall on freakin' April Fools Day.)

Can't delete them.  They won't delete because they are running.  I pull up Task Manager.  I close them.  I try to delete them.  In the amount of time it has taken me to get back to the delete screen, they've started running again.  I repeat this a lot. 

In the meantime, I install a firewall.  I move the unwanted programs to the desktop.  I turn Jack off and on again, and as soon as he starts up, I delete the unwanted programs before they have a chance to engage.  (Ha!)

I then open IE.

Instant barrage of adware again.  More Trojans discovered and cleansed.  Anti-Virus going nuts again, asking to rescan Jack AGAIN.  This time I get a clue and -- before rescanning -- reset my home page, which has been changed from google to adware central.

Now, at least, I can access the internet.  I completed this entry while doing the third virus scan, and Jack is apparently clean ... for now. 

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

holy moley.. yes, he's definitely growing fast! boys! ~Liz(mmmm crunchy!)

Anonymous said...

like i said, keep your eye on him. he's been a handful ever since you met him.

Anonymous said...

Good for you for getting right on top of Jack (heh) with the Trojan thing.

Anonymous said...

I went through the most horrible 2 weeks of my life dealing with trojans and virii. Learned more about the innerds of my computer than I ever wanted to. As a result, I now have 2 virus/adware scanners (Ad-aware and Spybot) that I run on almost a weekly basis, and run Mozilla browser. I still have trojans that are quarantined and can't be deleted but at least (Norton tells me) they can't create problems.