yyy65

Oh what a peice of work is spyware.

Have to say, I've been pretty lucky. Have been able to fly under the rader for the most part, where malware is concerned. Sucks that this week, there was this zero-day vulnerability discovered, and didn't I stumble across a site with it? Yes, yes, got infected with a handful of spyware. And while most of it (and a handful of bugs that Norton caught, God Forbid I have anything good to say about Symantec), one popup persists, (along with who knows what else).

Also getting some other pop-ups, just general advertising BS. Irritating. Ugh.

Regretfully, until yesterday, I had been telling everyone to use Firefox, but I myself was still using IE6. Yes. Bad, Martums, bad. Finally made Firefox 1.5 the default browser. A wee bit late.

So here's what I've done to get rid of these popups, some of which end in yyy65.html

1. installed Microsoft's Anti-Spyware beta, ran scan/sweep/etc. Thought that was already here.
2. had previously installed Mike Skallas' Ad-blocking hosts file (this guy's app is great, blocks tons of ads)
   
3. had previously installed IE-SPYAD2 from Eric Howes (another indispensible tool)
   
4. had previously installed Symantec Anti-Virus Corp Ed., which did catch several trojans while this was underway
5. installed Ad-Aware 6, ran scan/sweep/etc.
   
6. installed SpyBot S&D, ran scan/sweep/etc.
7. installed SpyWareBlaster, ran scan/sweep/etc.
8. installed A-Squared Guard, ran scan/sweep/etc.
9. installed Trend-Micro Anti-Spyware
   
10. installed Webroot's Spy Sweeper, which is scanning right now
11. installed E-Wido Anti-Malware (waiting for Spy Sweeper to finish)

So far, the pop-ups continue. I've decided that, one way or another, this box is no longer usable for personal business. So Quicken, Office, and other quasi-critical applications are moving off to a virtual Windows XP Pro box running under VMWare, on another physical box. No surfing for crap on that one. =)