What Was Your Worst Spyware Experience?

[Dr.Brain]

I think this would be interesting :

Im my opinion spywares are worst than regular viruses...

My worst spyware experience:

It changed my IE homepage to some other site and i remember it was some porn site...
MY desktop was full of adult material ...
I couldn't play computer at home and I rememba I used to tell my brother "dont play that computer " ... one day (i was 13) ..I had a plan ..that it wud be good to do sumthing, othawise my parents will kick me outta home ... I went to Settings .. (the ones u get at the start of computer system) ..and i changed all of them to exactly the opposites...It worked!..my windows couldn't start !... It had to be repaired from sum shop!

Any of your experiences?

 

[Mk]

That's my modeo!: If you can't fix it, mess it up really bad and blame it on something else.

 

[Dr.Brain]

^^^^

Hehe...Please relate your experiences too! this can be really interesting!

 

[Mk]

Why in hell (unless you live by yourself or with a roomate etc..) would you change your homepage to a porn site?

I don't have any experiences like that or with spyware/viruses. I'm a dedicated mac user, and I haven't gotten a virus, spyware, worm, adware, or anything else like that in 10 years. And if its not my computer or a shared one, I porn browse securely.

 

[Grogs]

Why in hell (unless you live by yourself or with a roomate etc..) would you change your homepage to a porn site?

He didn't His computer got infected by by a browser hijack program. I've never had anything serious on my (Win 2K) machine, but then I always keep my virus scanner updated, run Windows Update from time to time, don't allow most cookies, have a router on the inside of my cable modem, etc.)

My parents got infected by a browser hijack program once and it took me about 6 hours to get rid of it (on IE 6.) Norton didn't detect it as a virus and Ad Aware wouldn't get rid of it. I finally had to download a program called 'Hijack This' to get rid of it. It's not particularly user-friendly, but it brings up a list of everything in the registry that's not installed by default with windows. Unfortunately, there are lots of those (from programs you've installed) so I had to play trial and error until I found the registry entry that was causing the problem.

 

[Zygotic Embryo]

heh, I am a h4x0r

 

[primal schemer]

My browser got hijacked a while ago. Was a real pain in the ass. My browser kept spontaneously opening on different pages, some of which contained images of women with low moral fibre. https://www.physicsforums.com/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=1&p=580482#
Tongue2

It happened like every 5 minutes. I`d leave my computer (in the lab) for 20 mins, and there`d be all this porn on the screen when I got back!

Took me ages to get rid of it, I even had to get the administrator down.

Basically I put a load of spyware software on the computer and had that checking for spy/adware. I was amazed at how much was actually there!

Anyway, after taking ages to get rid of the browser annoyingly opening, I then kept getting prompts from the spyware removal software to update the spyware definitions, which was pretty much as annoying as getting the porn! So I removed most of them, and only kept the good ones.

I also switched to firefox, which seems to help.

PS

 

[franznietzsche]

Back when i still used windows I somehow got a trojan that put my computer completely under remote control. Watching that mouse move around on its own...I've never pulled an ethernet cable out of a computer so fast. Surprised i didn't break any thing in the process.

My brothers have a wonderful habit of getting viruses, spyware and trojans. Their computers routinely stop working. One of them has been out of comission for two years, nothing we does can boot it (even swapping hard drives). Best guess, the BIOS got fried.

I haven't had an unauthorized progam in ages though. Its nice having a proper operating system. Of course, everyonce in a while, my brother's computer will try to send to me a virus, typically through AIM. That's the most exciting virus story I've had for the past year.

 

[franznietzsche]

heh, I am a h4x0r

You're a damned troll is what you are.

 

[Mk]

heh, I am a h4x0r

liek omg! supr1337 h4xx0r! me 2!

 

[gravenewworld]

One word that will solve most of your problems-

FIREFOX

 

[Moonbear]

My brothers have a wonderful habit of getting viruses, spyware and trojans. Their computers routinely stop working.

What is amazing to me is that people nowadays are just so nonchalant about the whole idea of getting computer viruses. It's like you just seem to expect it, so why fight it? I remember the first time a friend of mine got a computer virus and was trying to inform everyone she shared files with in case it spread to our computers, and she said it felt as if she was going around admitting to having an STD. Times sure have changed.

I've only had two viruses ever. One on an old PC. It would pop up a warning dialog box that had weird messages. The other was on a shared Mac (second generation iMac...those stupid fruit-colored ones), and it changed menu options to funny names and an odd font. Neither was particularly destructive, just annoying. I get emails with viruses in them from who-knows-where (I don't know if they are spoofing addresses, or if my email address is on some spam mailing list being passed around by idiots, but I don't recognize any of the names they come from)...they don't infect macs, and I now have my junk mail filter set to just screen them out, but my antivirus software identified one sitting in my junk mail folder, so I'm sure they have a virus in them, not that I've taken the chance of opening any.

 

[The_Professional]

Back when I could care less about computer security, my durable, outdated yet still functioning Compaq P-166 was infected with all sorts of viruses. Joshi, Microbe, Pentagon to name a few. One of them was written by a 16 yr old Israeli kid. Running on AOL on it didn't made it any better. But it says something about the durability of the Compaq.

 

[Grogs]

One word that will solve most of your problems-

FIREFOX

I can honestly say I've been using IE 5.x for about 3 years and I have never had so much as a Norton popup saying someone website X is trying to infect me with a virus. The controls are in there (although poorly designed), it's just that most people don't take the time to figure out how to do them.

In my particular case, I use zones (the security tab) to control IE's behavior. The first thing I do (when I set up the browser) is to set the security on the internet (default) zone to high. I then go to custom and pretty much turn everything off: no cookie, no java or scripts, no flash, no ActiveX (I do leave file downloads turned off.)

At this point you could stop since you've turned off most of the functions that allow hackers/spyware/etc. to infect your browser, but you would have a neutered and in some cases unusable browser. Without cookies, for example, you can't use a shopping cart, can't stay logged on at PF. This is where I use another zone, in my case, the 'restricted' zone (note that this is totally opposite of what MS intended the restricted zone for, but it matters not.) The 'restricted' zone gets medium security with a few mods (for example, I want to know if somebody is installing an ActiveX app on my computer whether it's safe or not.) Then, any site I like (and actually requires a decrease in security) gets added to the restricted zone, such as *.physicsforums.com.

I know that it *sounds* complicated, but I can make the necessary changes to IE in about 2 minutes. It also gives me no almost no browser compatability problems since I'm using IE. Another nice benefit is that a lot of the windows/office components will look to IE's zone settings for security. So if I play a file in Windows Media Player and it wants to connect to connect to an internet site and download a virus via script, it should see that scripts are turned off for the default zone and fail to do so.

 

[dduardo]

Umm...yeah...

The last time I got a virus/spyware was so long ago that I don't even remember anymore.

Life seems so dull with Linux. Nothing exciting ever happens.

 

[franznietzsche]

Umm...yeah...

The last time I got a virus/spyware was so long ago that I don't even remember anymore.

Life seems so dull with Linux. Nothing exciting ever happens.

If you want excitement run rm-rf * from a random directory. THATs excitement.

Accidently did that from one directory higher than i thought i was in once. It was the last time i ever used that command.

 

[dduardo]

If you want excitement run rm-rf * from a random directory. THATs excitement.

Accidently did that from one directory higher than i thought i was in once. It was the last time i ever used that command.

Yeah, too bad you have to be root to do any real damage.

 

[franznietzsche]

Yeah, too bad you have to be root to do any real damage.

I was root at the time. Had been editing some files in somewhere in /etc i think. Went to empty a directory i had made, but didn't realize i was a directory above that. Yeah. Dumbest thing I've ever done in linux.

 

[dduardo]

Yeah, that's why I set the PS1 variable in my .bashrc to print out the whole directory path.

For example:

PS1='\u@\h (\w) # '

displays:

username@hostname (/etc/apache2) #

 

[mattmns]

I got a virus one time while using XP, at least I think it was a virus. My computer was extremely slow, so I just reformatted and everything was fast again. Using linux was nice because there is a very very small risk. However, I use xp again, so I just do not use IE and my computer seems to be going smooth. If I get a virus again I will reformat in a second, and maybe consider reinstalling linux.

 

[Mk]

If you want excitement run rm-rf * from a random directory. THATs excitement.

Accidently did that from one directory higher than i thought i was in once. It was the last time i ever used that command.

rm-rf, obviously it does something überbad. What?

 

[dduardo]

rm = remove
-r = recursive
-f = force

Therefore this command removes everything, including subdirectories, without asking for confirmation (it forces the removal).