On Thu Apr 15, 2010, Bob Sneidar bobs at twft.com wrote:
Hi Wilhelm.
I know pretty much why all of these things you mentioned work the way
they do but I will not go into that here. What you have is a
particularly nasty flavor of spyware, that has several processes that
checks up on the other bits of itself to make sure you don't do
exactly what you are doing. When they detect that you are attempting
to remove the other pieces they simply restore them.
There are a couple of approaches I could recommend, but none of them
are guaranteed to succeed, at least not completely. Once you get a bug
like this, only a wipe (including deleting the partition and creating
a new one) and reinstall of the OS is going to guarantee success.
(snip)
2. Install XP sp2 or higher (avoid Vista just because it sucks, Win 7
is great)
Hello Bob,
Thank you for your comprehensive analysis of my troubles and the
recommendations of how to proceed.
I am already runnning "XP sp2". - Just to make this clear, would you
think it possible that the Microsoft "Internet Explorer" itself could be
transformed into such a self-replicating spyware?
In any case, since I have "disassembled" the Internet Explorer in the
way I described in my last post, I am - until now - no longer the target
of such annoying intrusions, or is this merely a coincidence in time?
To test the protectiveness of Microsoft for the IE - as I had pointed
out which was the cause for the European Union to sue Microsoft - I
looked at one of my other Windows computers also running WindowsXP SP2 -
an Asus laptop: I encountered the same problems here when trying to
remove the Internet Explorer.
Renaming the folder is being denied, renaming file "iexplore.exe" is
possible, but immediately after the renaming a new instance of
"iexplore.exe" appears.
Maybe we could get the European Union to sue Apple as well in case they
do not alter their presumed restrictive policy concerning the
development of apps for IPhone and iPad? After all, although they have
not yet introduced the new European currency, Edinburgh and the UK are
indeed lying on the Northern fringe of Europe.
That about sums it up. If all that seems unreasonable, I would suggest
looking into the Apple OS X. Nothing is perfect, but real exploits for
this OS are very rare, and there are none I know about presently that
a fully patched OS can be compromised by. I am an IT pro and I have to
live and work in both worlds. Most of my time is spent fixing and
protecting the Windows side of things.
I also live in both worlds and have used MacOS since the invention of
Hypercard. But I need Windows, because most of the computers in our
institution run Windows, with an increasing shift towards Linux. Only
our College of Fine Arts relies mainly on MacOS.
Best regards,
Wilhelm
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