spyware causing ****??

dgray2003

had a teacher go freakin nuts when a **** page was opening up as her home page; all it said in the home page address bar is "click here to view this website" in all caps. its a simple fix just reset home page to google.com or something and voila!! it goes away. the site was omega.main-hosting.com/~server10/1.php or something along those lines; wondering if anyone knows about some spyware out there that causes **** to come up as a home page

DirtySouth

Uh....yah. There are probably hundreds of malware/adware/spyware programs that do this. It would be tough to nail it down to one without doing a scan on that computer.

Slowhand

I'd recommend you run an antivirus scan, and then an anti spyware scan. Something like Ad-Aware, Webroot, or Acronis should do just fine. (I highly recommend Acronis Privacy Expert Suite.)

JDMurray

Microsoft's Windows Defender is a surprisingly good spyware detection/removal tool for XP, Vista, and Windows Server 2003. It downloads its definition files though Windows Update. If was intended to be a "for pay" program, but I've heard that Microsoft has decided to give it away for free.

http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx

DirtySouth

Yep, those are all good programs. Unfortunately, a single scanner won't find everything so its usually good to run a combination of at least 2 different programs.

I use AVG Antivirus & for everything else, Windows Defender & Spybot-Search & Destroy. I used to use Lavasoft Adware until I found out they were accepting money to "overlook" certain things. Thats BULL if you ask me.

JDMurray

DirtySouth wrote:

I used to use Lavasoft Adware until I found out they were accepting money to "overlook" certain things. Thats BULL if you ask me.

That's why you should always use several different Spyware and virus scanners. What the free version of Adaware misses (or deliberately skips) another Spyware scanner will catch.

blargoe

I think I read where Microsoft actually owns one of the spyware companies and they used to skip whatever it was that got installed from that company. I do not know if this is still the case.

Use no less than 2 antispyware scanners and an anti-virus program if you get infected.

For active and passive protection, I use spybot (for blocking of specific programs in real time), spywareblaster (for adding bad sites to list of restricted sites, which prevents downloads from those sites, ie-spyad2 (same reason as spywareblaster), zonealarm (firewall), and any anti-virus program.

ukcommando

It's interesting to hear the comment about Ad-Aware not being fully trustworthy (at least in the free version). It's gained a fairly good reputation, so I doubt that many people use other spyware programs as well.......

RussS

OK, lets get to some facts here instead of rumor and guesswork.

No, Microsoft did/does not own a spyware company ........ ummm, except for MS itself

Adaware was NOT paid to overlook certain spyware. There are a couple spyware companies that object to being called that and have taken several Antispuyware companies to court. Those companies software include Adaware, Spybot and a few others. Microsoft basically told them to get stuffed and are happy to go to court as they feel they will win, whereas the smaller places can not afford that.

oreoman685 - boot in Safe Mode With Networking and empty the Temp and Temp Internet folders in the users profile. Empty the Temp and Prefetch folders in the Windows folder and then do an online scan from Ewido and Trend Micro or Panda. That gets rid of most what I see daily.

malcybood

one other thing to add to Russ' comments is to disable system restore whilst you carry out the maintenance then once the machine is cleaned enable it again and create a restore point.

JDMurray

This thread is eight months old and it looks like oreoman685 hasn't posted since then.

RussS

JDMurray wrote:

This thread is eight months old and it looks like oreoman685 hasn't posted since then.

Hey - I'm old .... don't expect me to read the fine print do ya?