6 ms·

The thing is you don't actually know what these programs are doing behind the scenes. Hijacking browser home page is the most innocent thing.

• simonh 12y ago
  A colleague managed to get one of thse toolbar things on his computer. It was a nightmare. It installed a second hidden browser plugin to keep re-installign the toolbar and re-setting your default search engine every time the browser restarts. Then there was a startup exe installed to re-install the plugins and toolbar on system restart. Then there was something else rooted in there somewhere that kept downloading and re-enabling that if you disabled it in msconfig. We had to do some serious registry hacking and manual system32 folder cleanup to finally kill the blasted thing. Not that I've had to deal with anything like that at home since 2007. OSX all the way baby! I've probably got back a couple of weeks of my life over the last 7 years, when you add in time spent messing with device driver version issues and general system tuning.
  • TeMPOraL 12y ago
    On Windows, Restore Point are (still) a good one-stop solution against this kind of crap. The most annoying malware I've removed this way was one that automatically killed any instance of cmd.exe and regedit.exe that you opened.
    • simonh 12y ago
      You have to admire* their tennacity. * Warning: No actual admiration included.
    • acdha 12y ago
      Malware routinely hides in the restore points – it avoids anything which is configured not to scan them (this was surprisingly widespread a few years back, although I hope it's improved) and might even get someone to reactivate it if you restore for any other reason. Trying to bolt security on after the fact like this is a losing game.