Attacked by Spyware & Adware

Since last two days my computer has been hijacked by Spyware and Adware. Believe me it’s most annoying and helpless feeling you will experience while using your own computer.

Having faced this kind of attack previously, I knew it was a tough & tedious task to win the war against Spyware and Adware. Now, I only wish if I could have remembered the software that I used previously. It would have saved lot of time and efforts. Suddenly, I was in need of software which could perform 'The Job' without costing a dime. The plan was to 'Find and Destroy'

The first in the line was Windows Defender but couldn’t install it due to the missing upgrade of XP service pack- 2. The Microsoft auto-update failed to apply XP service pack-2.

The next one was Ad-Aware Personal from Lavasoft but after running server times in normal and safe mode, it failed to destroy the enemy. I knew I was in deep trouble.

Then the Spybot-Search & Destroy, which could only ‘Search’ in free version and was asking for upgrade to destroy it. I said “Next…”

The Next was, Spyware Doctor which also failed to destroy the enemy after many attempts. It just wasted huge amount of time scanning the computer.

After wasting enough time, It was time for a change in strategy, I found its process in memory which is causing this. I used Security Task Manager, to identify the memory process and deleting it permanently but it failed to identify the malicious process, which might be behaving like windows genuine process. It was too risky to delete window genuine process, which could have disastrous effect on entire operating system causing failure to restart.

The manual process of deleting entries from Registry using Regedit also did not work successfully.

It was time to take a bold decision. The decision was to Remove the entire Internet Explorer. Yes, you heard me correctly. Being a Firefox fan, I knew I would survive without IE for a time being.

The first attempt to remove IE in normal mode failed due to ‘File in use’ error. It was the Safe Mode restart that has completely removed IE.

Finally, I restarted the computer in normal mode, connected with Internet, opened Firefox browser, visited random websites and waited for 5 minute still no pop-up, no flashing banner and that was the moment I felt sign of relief.

I am not sure if I won the war against Spyware and Adware. There might be a process waiting for IE to get installed and start attacking again or the Spyware Plug-In might have got deleted with the Removal of IE. For now my strategy is Just Wait and Watch.