Bleh...

[coyoteden.livejournal.com]

I just had one of our Docs practically bust down my broom closet office door (NO!) carrying hard copy of a Pop-up page he got on his machine at home (NO! #2) warning him that "Your PC is infected with spyware! Here's your IP, Browser and OS as proof!"

He's panicking. Muchly. (NO! #3)

He has a Mac.

Gah.

ObFunny: Speaking of things that are in no way P.C., here's something to consider: Do computers have gender, and are they female like automobiles are traditionally thought to be? Well, as far as I can tell, any PC running Windows will bloat, get cramps a few days a month, and blow up when something goes wrong.
Disclaimer: I didn't write that. Not really my opinion, though I think we all agree Windows can be a bitch.

ObSpyware: At my other job my most frequent fix these days for every sort of system buggery is running Spybot S&D. Sad, just sad, because 1) Spyware has gone way too far and 2) I always tell the lusers how to download and run Spybot, and when they can't even get THAT right, I go out and charge $55-$75 to do it for them.

Comments

[hoffman-log.livejournal.com]

Computers are Women point #2:

They store the tiniest error in their memory for recalling later.

_MaH

[(Anonymous)]

apperantly we just had to stop running spybot in general at the office.

Nine out of ten computers it was run on blew up!

Even fresh installs of windows .. explorer would get corrupted when spybot did its preventative protection.

Odd... but hey, it's free, it's not perfect.

[coyoteden.livejournal.com]

Never seen spybot break Explorer or IE like that, but you might have some app that uses plugins, and Spybot's immunize is blocking it.

There is something about your installs at the office that spybot conflicts with... I'd likely say it's the changes spybot makes to the DSO libraries to prevent stealth downloads from bad sites.

Ad-aware would probably cause the same problem, in fact, I have personally seen Ad-aware break systems where Winsock had been hijacked by spyware. Ad-aware still doesn't fix LSP-jacking properly, resulting in no net for you.

Re: Odd... but hey, it's free, it's not perfect.

[(Anonymous)]

that's what I thought too .. so I decided to get the whole thing documented, and its totatlly random. Virgin xp pro boxes (we install with oem cd's), some with Office 2003 SBE, some without. Some with updates run, some without. But every time it happens its the first reboot after being installed. It's funky cause after 100 computers in the last month, there's no pattern ... other then we had to redo 86 of them.

*shrugs*
All I know is after that, I dun feel safe putting it on my boxes.

[hillarygayle.livejournal.com]

I kinda like when I get virus emails on my Macs at home. I laugh & point & poke the virus with sticks until I finally put it out of its' misery by deleting it.

Wow. Too much Diet Code Red. Caffeine makes me silly.

Wha? dCR?

[coyoteden.livejournal.com]

Where did you find Diet Code Red? We have Diet Dew around here, but none of the variants.

Oh, ya do know there's some sort of Mac OS X virus that looks like an mp3? It even opens a song in iTunes after it r00ts you. You have to be real stupid to open it tho.

Re: Wha? dCR?

[hillarygayle.livejournal.com]

Heh. Yeah, point & laugh though I may, I'd never attempt to OPEN anything. ^___^

Yes, we've got it around here. I'm in Jonesboro, Arkansas, which is a town about an hour northeast of Memphis, Tennessee. I've never seen it in MEMPHIS, but we've got Diet Code Red all over around here. I get it in 12-packs at Wal-Mart & Kroger as well. It's absolutely my favorite drink in history.

Re: Wha? dCR?

[random-c.livejournal.com]

I heard it was just a proof-of-concept thing released by an AV company, and doesn't *actually* do anything.
As for male/female computers, I have some of each. My g4 server is female, my current powerbook is male, the iBook was male (but I suspect gay) and my P4 is male. The thing's too much of a lazy pain in the butt to be female. ;)

[fyre.livejournal.com]

have them download AdAware, too (www.lavasoft.de).

Spybot catches a lot, but adaware catches a lot of different things that spybot does not.

I ran spyboy on one of our systems at work, and followed it with adaware. Even after running Spybot, AdAware found over 50 hits.