My wife thought it would be cool to put a Bulldog screen saver on the primary machine at the house. She had been on dictionary.com looking up something.. she got a pop-up for a screen saver. It had a picture of Sponge Bob so she figured it was harmless. She clicked around for awhile.. didn't find a screen saver she liked apparently.. she got up and walked off..
I went in to check stats about 2 hours later.. found so many windows open the machine had run out of memory. I killed all the windows and started trying to figure out what the hell happened. The desktop has got about 10 new icons on it.. I have 2 new programs running in the Windows toolbar. I open up a web browser and I have a new tool bar! Wonderful.. now I have windows popping all over the place.
What I found.. Spybot Search & Destroy did its best.. but it didn't come close to removing everything. Ad-Aware did something it had never done before.. locked up. I began to remove stuff from the registry by hand. After about an hour or so of killing things by hand I went looking for another program to help.. I found Spy Sweeper... I'd never heard of it before. Spy Sweeper found stuff that Spybot didn't..
After hours and hours of jacking with it I think I finally have everything back the way it was. Scariest part about all this.. I found a key logger. I'm glad my wife didn't decide to buy something online with the machine in that state.
I now hate Sponge Bob Square Pants.
|