Spyware Out Of Control

Friend of mine comes to me the other day and says spyware has
completely taken over control of her PC. After I made a few
suggestions, she said she tried everything. Apparently she has no
internet access, can't use any of her utilities (system restore),
nothing in safe mode works, and so on.
I downloaded versions of Spybot and Ad-Aware to a CD and gave it to
her. I haven't talk to her yet to see if they did any good.
She also mentioned that it had actually gone in and rewrote her BIOS.
I didn't even know that was possible. Anyway, just wanted to get some
ideas from some of you, in the event Spybot and Lavasoft don't work.
Any thoughts would be appreciated!

Thanks in advance, Steve

StevoReno

"StevoReno" <> wrote in message
news: om...
> Friend of mine comes to me the other day and says spyware has
> completely taken over control of her PC. After I made a few
> suggestions, she said she tried everything. Apparently she has no
> internet access, can't use any of her utilities (system restore),
> nothing in safe mode works, and so on.
> I downloaded versions of Spybot and Ad-Aware to a CD and gave it to
> her. I haven't talk to her yet to see if they did any good.
> She also mentioned that it had actually gone in and rewrote her BIOS.
> I didn't even know that was possible. Anyway, just wanted to get some
> ideas from some of you, in the event Spybot and Lavasoft don't work.
> Any thoughts would be appreciated!
>
> Thanks in advance, Steve

Hijack this might help. Also BHO Demon.
Lastly she probably wants to do a virus scan as soon as she can. I've run
into quite a few computers that are infected with viruses in addition to the
spyware. I had lots of trouble lately with a computer that was infected by
some spyware called exim4. I had to completely delete the directory that it
was in in command safe mode to get rid of it and then reboot into regular
safe mode and take it out with MSCONFIG and finally regedit for the
registry. It had brought everything to a halt on the computer. It was
taking like 7 or 8 minutes just to boot.

AG

AG

I Had this happen a few days ago. Person brought a Win98 pc to me, said it
was slow. I turned it on and it took like 10 minutes just to boot up
everything. I took the hard drive completely out of the pc, attached it to
one I have working for just such an occasion and scanned it with lavasoft,
and mcafee antivirus. I removed 186 pieces of spyware and two programs that
were spyware/virus like. I then had to go into the registry and remove by
hand the keys for the various programs that were removed, I then had to go
into msconfig and tinker to make sure no residual program related to this
spyware attempted to load and take up resources(over half of the items in
the startup menu were spyware or related to spyware)and with that the
computer loads up in less than two minutes. I am also installing at her
request an additional 128MB stick of memory which will help alleviate some
of the memory problems. The pc was an HP6683 with a celeron cpu and 64MB of
pc100. I also configured the swap file to use up to 1Gb of hard drive space
until the extra memory is purcased. Overall I have seen an extensive
improvement in usability.
My advice, hook up your friends hard drive to a working pc with updated
antivirus definitions and lavasoft and scan the drive. Then defragment it,
and do a scandisk/chkdsk on the drive.
What do you mean it "rewrote the bios"? Exactly how did it rewrite the
BIOS and what did it do?

me

If she hasn't got internet accesss, where did she get the spyware? I
dont think its possible to rewrite the BIOS. The programs you gave her
are o.k. . Maybe she's got a virus. She needs a good virus scannig
program. Does she get programs or other applications from friends
alot? That's a possibility. If so , she needs to scan any cd's,
floppys, or any other removable media that she gets before she uses
it. Spyware tends to be targeted at people who browse the web. I think
that if she has no web access, she might have got a virus from
somewhere. Hope this helps....Jonathan

Jonathan L

If all else fails, backup important data and reinstall the os......Jonathan

Jonathan L

I've worked on 3 customer's PCs in the past week that were heavily infested
with spyware and virii. On one PC, a virus had disabled Norton Anti-Virus
and deleted the executable to run the scans. Spyware coders are getting
wise also and are finding ways to escape the spyware scans of Adaware and
Spybot S&D. They are still the two best as far as I'm concerned, but they
are falling victims to their own popularity. Spyware coders are trying to
find ways to make it around these two apps.
As far as other programs that might be able to help... Hijack This,
CWShredder, and BHO Demon. I read in PC Mag that Pest Patrol is good and
trustworthy, but I have yet to try it.
On a side note, many supposed spyware scanners out there contain spyware
themselves, or are poorly written code. I've worked on 2 systems so far
that had Webroot's trial version of Spysweeper installed and mucked up the
systems pretty good.
The root problem to all of this is that people are not educated on how to
deal with this "new" threat. Not enough people, even when they have good
spyware scanners installed, update the files regualarly. People still don't
believe or understand that they must update anti-virus software DAT files.
People refuse to educate themselves, and that is fine with me. I'll keep
getting paid to "fix" stuff that they should have prevented to begin with.
I can only try to help and educate them. I can't force them to do it.

Chris
A+, Net+


"StevoReno" <> wrote in message
news: om...
> Friend of mine comes to me the other day and says spyware has
> completely taken over control of her PC. After I made a few
> suggestions, she said she tried everything. Apparently she has no
> internet access, can't use any of her utilities (system restore),
> nothing in safe mode works, and so on.
> I downloaded versions of Spybot and Ad-Aware to a CD and gave it to
> her. I haven't talk to her yet to see if they did any good.
> She also mentioned that it had actually gone in and rewrote her BIOS.
> I didn't even know that was possible. Anyway, just wanted to get some
> ideas from some of you, in the event Spybot and Lavasoft don't work.
> Any thoughts would be appreciated!
>
> Thanks in advance, Steve

Chris E

I find it highly unlikely that a piece of spyware would rewrite the BIOS
but not impossible. I have an Asus utility that can flash the bios
from Windows. If a utility can do it, then spyware can. However, it
would need a lot of technical info about different motherboards that
should be pretty hard for malware writers to get. You never know though.

- Jeremy

Jonathan L wrote:
> If she hasn't got internet accesss, where did she get the spyware? I
> dont think its possible to rewrite the BIOS. The programs you gave her
> are o.k. . Maybe she's got a virus. She needs a good virus scannig
> program. Does she get programs or other applications from friends
> alot? That's a possibility. If so , she needs to scan any cd's,
> floppys, or any other removable media that she gets before she uses
> it. Spyware tends to be targeted at people who browse the web. I think
> that if she has no web access, she might have got a virus from
> somewhere. Hope this helps....Jonathan

Jeremy

"Jeremy" <> wrote in message
news:JfSpd.2728$ m...
>I find it highly unlikely that a piece of spyware would rewrite the BIOS
>but not impossible. I have an Asus utility that can flash the bios from
>Windows. If a utility can do it, then spyware can. However, it would need
>a lot of technical info about different motherboards that should be pretty
>hard for malware writers to get. You never know though.
>

I'm still not sure whether he meant it rewrote the actual BIOS rom chip, or
overwrote some CMOS settings? If it did the former, I'd guess the computer
wouldn't even boot if the virus was malicious enough.

Patrick Michael

> As far as other programs that might be able to help... Hijack This,
> CWShredder, and BHO Demon. I read in PC Mag that Pest Patrol is good and
> trustworthy, but I have yet to try it.
>> Chris
> A+, Net+
After I read this I downloaded Pest Patrol and tried it, it came up with 244
hits compared to just 11 for spybot,but the trail version will not remove
them,you must pay so it appears to be very good. There is a conflict between
Spybot and Pest Patrol,that does cause false positives,if they are both
installed,that you need to be aware of.
"D"

GWB

On 26 Nov 2004 04:09:10 -0800, (StevoReno) wrote:

>Friend of mine comes to me the other day and says spyware has
>completely taken over control of her PC. After I made a few
>suggestions, she said she tried everything. Apparently she has no
>internet access, can't use any of her utilities (system restore),
>nothing in safe mode works, and so on.
>I downloaded versions of Spybot and Ad-Aware to a CD and gave it to
>her. I haven't talk to her yet to see if they did any good.
>She also mentioned that it had actually gone in and rewrote her BIOS.
>I didn't even know that was possible. Anyway, just wanted to get some
>ideas from some of you, in the event Spybot and Lavasoft don't work.
>Any thoughts would be appreciated!
>
>Thanks in advance, Steve

Rewrote the BIOS?

What OS? A DOS and/or floppy boot may be the start of the solution
here.

I'll also suggest that you see the computer yourself for an accurate
assessment of what is wrong with it. Word of mouth is not the way to
go in the techie world, usually.

Tom

Tom MacIntyre