Horsing Around w/Trojans

NYC was great and continued into a good week. Alas it didn't take long for me to bog my evenings productivity once I got back, though:

I'm loving my new ThinkPad but am still getting used to the sensitivity of the keyboard and the little red clitoris eraser head in the middle of it. Between that and working paced ambitiously, foolishly I clicked on something I shouldn't have a few nights ago. I ended up infected with Trojan.Purity, Trojan.Vundo and a host of other annoyances.

I took several passes both in and out of Safe Mode, and with several tool scans. After working through Spybot S&D, Symantec AntiVirus, Spycatcher and a couple lightweight removal tools made specifically for the main afflictions, I was getting worried. AntiVirus was only partially quarantining items, and only finding them in normal system mode. Spycatcher was only finding a few but not able to delete all. Spybot was seeing almost none of the problems to even take a stab at fixing them. To my particular surprise Symantec's Vundo Remover was failing to find all of the problems, and their list of suggested registry deletions was a mile long for that problem in particular. I'd already cleaned Purity out that way by the time I knew I was also deeply hit by Vundo, but wasn't keen to get deep into that for that latter of the known problems. This was getting pretty frustrating. I've been a Symantec user since the very early years of Norton Disk Doctor and I've had colleagues and personal friends in and out of there and Veritas over the years. Even after they stopped supporting certain products on certain platforms, I've held some loyalty. Also, the small freeware removers some developers had posted were getting stuck in loops, concentrating on a couple .exe and .dll files that were either holding steadfast or continually coming back from the dead. Moreover, Microsoft's common malware removal tool looked so general that it wasn't even worth bothering with upon close inspection. This was starting to take hours.

At the end of it though, I made a pretty cool new discovery: Thanks to Prevx for kicking ass and finally taking all the pain away. You're my heroes this week after finding and successfully removing what eventually had become not 2, not 4, not 10, but a whopping 19 malignancies. I plan to sign up after my trial expires, and look forward to a week-end of cleanliness returned to my cherished new toy (Be warned however, that now of course that if/when a day comes that I come down with something you can't fix, I'll be kicking and screaming to you about it.).

Spread His Word

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