Okay, I’ve been following the anti-spyware advice in this thread for over a year now, and I can’t remember the last time I got nailed with a piece of spyware. Even before that, I hardly ever got hit by a piece of spyware, yet I know plenty of people battle this stuff on a constant basis, so I thought that a thread devoted to people recounting what they got hit with, how they got it, and how they finally got rid of it would be a benefit to everyone. And, what the heck, it is October, so sharing scary stories at this time of the year is traditional.
once, a piece of spyware ate my youngest child.
Eh, not much as my techy friends and spouse usually warned me to get hooked up before surfing when the whole Gator thing started.
Have a friend who was spooked by a bit of VPN software installed illegaly on his network (by one of his users) who eventually got a business case for it and installed it legally.
Did you link the right thread? That one is only from June.
Yeah, that’s the right thread. It took about a year of GQ being flooded with “Help! I’m being held hostage by spyware threads!” before that sticky got started, and I’d already been doing those things well before that.
I have Spybot and Adaware on my computer, and they seem to take care of most everything.
Scary story:
The only problem I have not been able to take care of is something called “static.callinghome.biz.” I did some searching and among the few sites I found (one was a person with the same problem and no solution), was the information that it is:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Vendor\XML
and supposedly is saved to %temp% on the local system. It’s also on the Webhelpers The Watchers list.
Not sure what it really does, what I’m supposed to do about it, but it pops up each time I reboot. I guess it doesn’t really count since it is ongoing, but there you go.