new approaches to spyware removal

[Greg12]

My friend has spyware on her computer and it is a bad infection.

She tried ad-aware and apparently it didn't remove the spyware. She wants anouther option besides reformat.


I thought perhaps if i mouted the drive as an external and hooked it up to my laptop, i could scan it without the OS on the drive booting up and activating the sypware.

Could this work or anyoe have any other ideas.

[aanaravs]

Try using spy sweeper and spy bot. It might help a lot. I have been using these 2 programs with adaware and has been pretty good so far. If it doesn't work, I guess the other approach could work.

[Faustus]

Make sure your using the new Adaware, also try Spybot Search and destroy. Also go grab spywareblaster

[IAIHMB]

Ad Bazooka Adware and Spyware program to that list. :P

[DVD_Ripper]

Make sure your using the new Adaware, also try Spybot Search and destroy. Also go grab spywareblaster

Ditto on Spybot.... very good program... make sure you download and install all the latest 'updates'... you should be scanning for about 12,500 'things'.

Once clean... make sure you install Kerio or another firewall.

[gitreel]

Look for & download hijackthis

[Capmaster]

I've gone from Adaware to Pest Patrol to Spybot S&D. So far SS&D seems to have the best definition update mechanism.

[Jayhawk]

Greg12, I have had some success with removing the hard drive and hooking it up to my "lab" machine as a secondary and then scanning it. It works much better for removing virus infections than spyware because a lot of spyware is registry-based, not file-based.

It does allowed you to snoop around the Program Files and Common Applications directories and delete known spyware folders (CoolWebSearch, Searchnow) and the SpyBot and Ad-Aware scans will catch some of the offenders.

I would try safe mode first. Don't forget BHODemon for those nasty helper objects. Trojan-Destroyer, Spybot, Ad-Aware are all good. I would throw everything at it first. Don't forget to turn off System Restore first. Clear the IE cache, temporary files, etc.

[gitreel]

http://computercops.biz/

[Byronleehk]

Try Adaware SE.

I used to use Adaware 6 and found nothing but the first scan with the new Adaware SE it found 77 items!

[thecoalman]

Or the 2 fail proof methods look through the spyware forums and look how to manually uninstall it or do a google search: spywarename "mauanl uninstall".

Edit: might want to spell manual right to get results

[Alan69]

You can't use one and expect it to get everything. When my sister got some, I looked around a bit and found similar suggestions from several sources:

1 CWShredder
2 AD Aware
3 Spybot S&D

In that order. These catch somewhat different things, so you need to do them all not depend on only one. A few places also added a fourth item don't remember what it was. But these were the common main 3 from many sites, and it got everything so I didn't bother with the fourth since it was mostly overlapped with Ad Aware and S&D.

Funny as hell to have regedit and config closing by themselves about 5 seconds after you open them..

Alan

[Greg12]

hooking it up as an external drive.