I’ve written a few posts about Anti-Virus software and the problems with spyware and malware. Unfortunately, this problem is not going away anytime soon.
My apologies to Saturday Night Live – and to my friends who remember the early days of the show, but:
SPYWARE BEEN BERY BERY GOOD TO ME
I spent a lot of time, hours of my life that I will never get back, fighting with spyware and for the most part fixing the infected computers. I had one system I was about to give up on, though I persevered and eventually triumphed over the nasty programs.
This week was interesting because I worked on two computers that belonged to people who were not current clients. I help one of my vendors with one of his clients on Friday, which turned out well.
This morning a friend brought me a computer from his new employer. We had talked about the spyware issue and I had suggested that he run Malwarebytes to fix it. It didn’t work so he brought it to me.
This system turned out to be the most challenging spyware infection ever. The registry was modified to run over 9000 programs at startup. The programs didn’t seem to do anything, though the system never would finish the startup process.
I tried a bunch of times to get the system to run Malwarebytes to no avail. I poked around until I found the 9000 startup entries. Once I had determined that this was the problem, I pulled a few things from my bag of tricks to see if I could fix things.
NO SUCH LUCK – So I gave up. I called my friend and left him a voice message to call me and see what plan B was. He never called back.
As I worked on other projects today, I kept going back to the problem machine. I tried a few free programs that I thought would clean the registry, with no luck. I finally found something that worked and I was on my way to another successful cleanup.
How much time was wasted on this and how much money. I would say that I spent about 5 hours messing with this system and about another 8 hours working on other systems this week.
13 Hours of my life that I will not get back. However at my billing rate…..
SPYWARE BEEN BERY BERY GOOD TO ME…….