Spyware sucks...
Yay, I did have this installed in Vista after all! Ahem...
Spyware is evil. Pure evil. Don't believe me? Let me relate a little tale...
About two weeks ago, I noticed I was getting ads on my XP desktop for something called "MS Antispyware 2009." Now, right away I should have had the oldschool Trek "Red Alert" Klaxon blaring through my skull at such a blatantly obvious scam -- but I was totally fooled by this thing when it popped up in my legitimate Windows Security Center toolbox, the way all my other legit protection programs did. I figure it must've installed under the radar during a System Update, and forgot about it.
Until the warnings showed up.
Again and again, I'd get a "Threat detected!" window popping up, telling me about this or that infected file found in my cache. At first I was alarmed, but that quickly passed when I discovered there was no obvious way to tell the program to actually deal with the threat. All it would do is tell me "You need to upgrade to the pro version," or words to that effect, in order for it to do much more than alert me to the presence of malware on my system. So, yeah, finally the light dawns on me what's going on here.
A quick trip to Google confirmed it - "MS Antispyware 2009" was in fact malware itself. An especially pernicious piece of malware at that. Not only does it throw up warnings every thirty seconds, interrupting your workflow and annoying the living excrement out of you, if you even so much as click into its window it will start propagating itself into your Registry and other system-essential areas. Which, like a complete and utter MORON, is exactly what I did when I first saw it was in my Security Center and didn't know any better.
The net result of all this was a hosed Windows partition... and as previously noted in this blog, as much as I may not care for Windows I do need it for certain essential tasks, as the Linuxy equivalents just aren't "there" yet for my needs. So I backed up everything I could, nuked the drive, and put a fresh install of Vista on there (since I was given to understand that Vista doesn't have nearly as many threats of this nature for it).
That worked fine, for about three or four days... and then, my computer stopped booting. Wouldn't load anything, and I couldn't fix the MBR using either MS-approved or Ubuntu-esque methods.
Frustrated, I had to take it into the shop, where it was revealed that a nasty side effect of the "MS Antispyware 2009" worm is that it will often work itself into the MBR, meaning it was still lurking about on my hard drive even after a total system reformat. He also explained to me just how I was able to pick it up in the first place, despite usually being extremely careful about what and where I visit; apparently, it can embed itself into perfectly innocent advertising code, and it must have come in through the radar under the guise of an otherwise utterly normal banner ad on one of the sites I frequent. It's self-propagating, too, so it's probably not the fault of the website itself or (I would hope) even the company responsible for the ad to begin with... it was one of those things that Just Happens.
Luckily, the guy was able to purge all remaining traces of the worm from my computer, and now I have a happy and healthy (albeit Vista-running) computer. Which hasn't given me much if any grief, it must honestly be said, save for that one incident (which I don't consider a knock against Vista itself, as it was a leftover from a previous OS).
Still, the lesson learned here is a simple one, I think. Even if you're extremely careful and know what you're doing, Bad Things can still happen to you and your computer. If you use Windows at all, an investment in a decent anti-malware program is never wasted money even in these tough times... consider that a good spyware killer will set you back about $30-40, while bench time for repairing a borked box can easily exceed $100. You don't have to be Enrico Fermi to figure out that math...
Spyware is evil. Pure evil. Don't believe me? Let me relate a little tale...
About two weeks ago, I noticed I was getting ads on my XP desktop for something called "MS Antispyware 2009." Now, right away I should have had the oldschool Trek "Red Alert" Klaxon blaring through my skull at such a blatantly obvious scam -- but I was totally fooled by this thing when it popped up in my legitimate Windows Security Center toolbox, the way all my other legit protection programs did. I figure it must've installed under the radar during a System Update, and forgot about it.
Until the warnings showed up.
Again and again, I'd get a "Threat detected!" window popping up, telling me about this or that infected file found in my cache. At first I was alarmed, but that quickly passed when I discovered there was no obvious way to tell the program to actually deal with the threat. All it would do is tell me "You need to upgrade to the pro version," or words to that effect, in order for it to do much more than alert me to the presence of malware on my system. So, yeah, finally the light dawns on me what's going on here.
A quick trip to Google confirmed it - "MS Antispyware 2009" was in fact malware itself. An especially pernicious piece of malware at that. Not only does it throw up warnings every thirty seconds, interrupting your workflow and annoying the living excrement out of you, if you even so much as click into its window it will start propagating itself into your Registry and other system-essential areas. Which, like a complete and utter MORON, is exactly what I did when I first saw it was in my Security Center and didn't know any better.
The net result of all this was a hosed Windows partition... and as previously noted in this blog, as much as I may not care for Windows I do need it for certain essential tasks, as the Linuxy equivalents just aren't "there" yet for my needs. So I backed up everything I could, nuked the drive, and put a fresh install of Vista on there (since I was given to understand that Vista doesn't have nearly as many threats of this nature for it).
That worked fine, for about three or four days... and then, my computer stopped booting. Wouldn't load anything, and I couldn't fix the MBR using either MS-approved or Ubuntu-esque methods.
Frustrated, I had to take it into the shop, where it was revealed that a nasty side effect of the "MS Antispyware 2009" worm is that it will often work itself into the MBR, meaning it was still lurking about on my hard drive even after a total system reformat. He also explained to me just how I was able to pick it up in the first place, despite usually being extremely careful about what and where I visit; apparently, it can embed itself into perfectly innocent advertising code, and it must have come in through the radar under the guise of an otherwise utterly normal banner ad on one of the sites I frequent. It's self-propagating, too, so it's probably not the fault of the website itself or (I would hope) even the company responsible for the ad to begin with... it was one of those things that Just Happens.
Luckily, the guy was able to purge all remaining traces of the worm from my computer, and now I have a happy and healthy (albeit Vista-running) computer. Which hasn't given me much if any grief, it must honestly be said, save for that one incident (which I don't consider a knock against Vista itself, as it was a leftover from a previous OS).
Still, the lesson learned here is a simple one, I think. Even if you're extremely careful and know what you're doing, Bad Things can still happen to you and your computer. If you use Windows at all, an investment in a decent anti-malware program is never wasted money even in these tough times... consider that a good spyware killer will set you back about $30-40, while bench time for repairing a borked box can easily exceed $100. You don't have to be Enrico Fermi to figure out that math...