It was getting excessive, the pop-ups and the hijacks and the general nuisances, so my aunt called me over to try to fix it yesterday. The computer has been in daily use and online for two and a half years with no Ad-Aware, spybot, firewall, antivirus…
So, I ran Ad-Aware, and watched as the number of objects started climbing. The final count:
2,056.
Two thousand fifty six…
And we couldn’t get rid of all of it. When I gave up, the computer was running better, but with intermittent bursts of popups every once in awhile.
What’s the most spyware you’ve ever found on a PC?
I’ve had a thousand or so on my mom’s computer when I first ran Ad-Aware. I once ran a virus scan on my brother’s computer that picked up like 600 infections. Awesome.
Ooh. My. And you have to click them all separately with Ad-Aware, too, right? There’s no “Select All” that I recall.
You’re going to run the other programs (Spybot S&D, Spyware Blaster, Microsoft’s program), too, right? Between those (and maybe some artful registry editing), you ought to take care of things as far as detection is concerned.
Yeah, 2056 is the most I have heard of. I ran one recently and hit about 1000. It is always best to run Ad-Aware in Safe Mode if you think there is a lot of spyware running. The last computer I debugged had 80 processes running on Start Up. :eek:
When I first installed Ad-Aware on my mom’s PC the scan came up with several hundred objects. Then when I visited a few months later I asked how it had been going, and she said, “You mean I was supposed to run it again?” Um, yeah.
“A friend of mine asked me, “You know what I like? Mashed potatoes.” I said, dude, if you want me to guess, you have to put a pause in there somewhere.”
Hey, I guessed close to the right answer! I said to myself 2,000, and then I opened the thread. Personally, the most was a few hundred on my dad’s computer. As far as my own PC, a few dozen. The worst I’ve seen was a friend’s GF’s computer. She reformatted and installed win XP. Less than a weel later almost 1,000 pieces of spyware and adware, in a WEEK! We asked her how in the Hell she got that many, and she didn’t know. In fact, she thought she was getting rid of them…why? Because a system message told her she was infected so she clicked on it…and more system messages popped up so she clicked ‘ok’ on those too. :smack:
People take for granted how fast the board is these days. Used to be, you could read that title, click on the link, and have several minutes to ponder. Not any more.
You should try running another freeware scanner, like SpyBot. I find that different scanners find different things–there might be thousands more that AdAware can’t see.
And, for those ones that it says it can’t delete, either it found the same one several times, deleted the “first” one, then tried to delete the rest of them and said, “Hey! I can’t find it! It’s hiding from me!”, or they’re currently running and Windows is helping you avoid crashing your system by not deleting files it’s currently running. Yay, Microsoft! Try re-running the scans in Safe Mode.
Dare I say, I’ve actually found Microsoft’s AntiSpyware Beta to be better at catching and eliminating adware and spyware than both Ad Aware and SpyBot. I still run the battery of three programs from time to time, but I’ve had the most luck with the Microsoft product. Scary, I know. With Ad Aware and SpyBot, I’ve found that it can’t erase half the stuff it finds, and I have to go regedit and manually delete programs by hand.
I found over 5,000 items on my bosses computer after it had been infected over the weekend. This is the most I’ve ever seen, especially after such a short period of time.
