Spyware hell

That was not fun. I just wasted a whole day or so trying to remove some evil spyware called “Vundo”. In short, it’s a nasty little piece of crap that pops up advertisements whenever it feels like it. It’s almost impossible to remove in Windows too, because it’s actually smart enough to resist almost every possible method of removal. Don’t take that as a complement, I’m just amazed that some moron somewhere has so little of a life that they have the time and energy to waste on something as pointless as this. In fact, it amazes me in general that morons who write spyware and virii don’t turn their skills to something productive, instead of joining the ranks of the scum and vermin of the internet.

So what did I do to remove it? After trying every single tool I could get my hands on to fix it, including (but not limited to) “VundoFix”, “Vundoh”, “Spyware Blaster”, “Spybot - Search and Destroy”, “Process Explorer”, “Advanced Process Manager”, “KillBox”, “ComboFix”, “Dellater”, “l2mfix”, “SmitFraudFix”, “Avenger”, “Brute Force Uninstaller”, and “HiJackThis” - none of which could actually remove the offending worthless piece of crap - I downloaded the Knoppix 5.1 Live CD, mounted my NTFS partition as read/write, deleted the offending DLL’s myself, then used HiJackThis to remove the offending registry entries.

What a pointless waste of time, and a tribute to Linux. Saved me again.

June 23, 2007 | Filed Under ramblings 

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