Monday, November 14, 2005

Want Trouble WIth Your PC?

My wife refers to our daughters as 'the butterflies' in my life.

That depends.

One arrived here over the weekend and settled in on the computer under my login (yup, that was my error,) and wanted to show a sister all about a hot new college thing--some site which includes a game centered around pictures of faces.

Quite some game, I guess. While there, she also downloaded a program that has pictures of clouds (maybe)--the .exe program was named "Cloudsim."

The .exe was a Trojan which zapped our SBC browser and ZoneAlarm. It did NOT zap Norton, nor IE, so after about 2 hours' of root-and-branch surgery the computer seems to have recovered.

Parents, don't let your daughters grow up to be downloaders....
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6 comments:

  1. Anonymous11/14/2005 4:21 PM

    Parents, don't let your daughters grow up to be downloaders....haha
    And don't let them do their nails by their computers. Especially while using nail polish remover. My 19 year old butterfly ruined her laptop keyboard by spilling half a bottle on it.
    My 3 year old butterfly still thinks a keyboard is a piano that just doesn't work.

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  2. Rick Lugari11/14/2005 6:56 PM

    Is everything running right, now? When I had to rid the afforementioned batterfly's computer of spyware, I had to use mutiple utilities to complete the process.

    Adaware took care of a good chunk, but then I ran Spybot which found some more, then I had to run hijack-this to find some registry settings that would allow the darn things to reconstitute themselves.

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  3. Dad2911/15/2005 8:45 AM

    I haven't gone to the registry yet. Thanks for the tip on "hi-jack this"--

    FYI, P-cillin also mentioned registry adjustments, but you have to buy the package to find out which ones/how.

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  4. Rick Lugari11/15/2005 6:29 PM

    No problem. Just don't buy anything. It can all be done for free. ;)

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  5. Dad2911/15/2005 8:52 PM

    Well, I bought something anyway--both Registry Mechanic and HijackThis!

    RegMech is really good--I've used it before and the performance improvement is noticeable, even with only 40% of memory utilized. They do have a glitch: when you run it according to their suggestions, you lose the Word Templates that you created.

    ARRRRrrrrghggghghghh.

    As to Hijack!--wow. Great stuff, found a couple hundred nasties, took 'em out in about 3 seconds.

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  6. Rick Lugari11/15/2005 9:21 PM

    Great...Hijack this was my saving grace too.

    ...and the best prevention has been forbidding her to use IE.

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