Re: antiviral programs scam?
- From: Borked Pseudo Mailed <nobody@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2006 12:09:18 -0600 (MDT)
cporro wrote:
<snippage>
ironically i must have been infected either right after of right before
i installed it. soon my OS was giving me notifications that i was
infected.
Or, you had been infected for a long while but somehting changed that
might bring it to your attention. Like some sort of antivirus software
only partially removing a piece of malware that previously managed to hide
itself from you.
Things aren't always as they appear, especially when dealing with complex
machines.
a process called "iexplore" was always hanging up my machine
when i tried to restart. no, this was not from me launching Internet
explorer. i use firefox. a program called spywarequake was generous
enough to have installed itself as well.
Iexplore runs as a sort of "window manager" on windows systems. It gives
you much of that pretty user interface, and thus the reason it can never
be FULLY uninstalled from a Windows box. :(
so, i ran the shield on my system. the whole thing. and it didn't' do a
damn thing. in fact the machine just crashed after about an hour of
scanning.
long story short, i did some research and found a way to manually remove
spywarequake:
http://www.sunbelt-software.com/spyware/SpywareQuakeRemoval.html
FWIW, the best course of action is to not get infected in the first place. ;)
Not to say anything about your particular incident(s), but no software can
ever be expected to reliably repair a damaged system. Sometimes it's
impossible. Usually it's impossible to return your system to its
"pristine" state, but possible to get it to a place that it's working
properly.
it has never appeared again and my system has stopped saying i'm infected.
however, a process called "iexpore" was still hangin me up when i did a
restart. i feel like my problems are not completely solved.
They may never be without you restoring your system from clean backups.
You do have backups, don't you? :)
almost forgot, after this my OS was behaving funny. and i did read that
spywarequake could mess with your OS. anyway i tried to do a reinstall and
my machine got hung up again. would no recognize the CD-rom. finally i got
a reinstall from an external cd-rom.
If you're "reinstalling" over top of an old copy of Windows you're
probably either going to make no difference at all, or cause yourself more
problems as whatever is messing with your system breaks. Yes, it sounds
odd, but viruses have a vested interest in keeping your machine up and if
you mess with them you run the risk of making the machine unusable.
Best to completely wipe the drive and start over clean, from a known clean
install media, without any remnants of the old copy of your operating
system anywhere around.
MY QUESTION:
is there a frighten and scam angle to these antiviral programs? i mean
Of course. There's good used car salesmen, and bad. Professional home
re-modelers, and fly-by-nights. Good doctors, and quacks. Just like any
business there's a bad element. Although there may be a few more in the
computer security business because most people are far less ignorant
about brains surgery, cars, and additions to their houses than they are
computer security. ;-)
There IS a lot of FUD and propaganda out there. Best you can do is study
and ask questions where independent thinkers hang out.
this program did absolutely nothing for me. they took my money. apparently
i "need" them. but the reality i'm experiencing is something like this.
don't download stuff from sketchy porn sites.
Are there porn sites that AREN'T "sketchy"? <grinning>
.
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