Having hopscotched my way across a zillion knitting and non-knitting blogs in the past few weeks since finally getting the blogging itch and doing something about it rather than just hydrocortisoning it with the "I'm too busy" cream, I ended up with some nasty malware - or what I've now seen termed 'scumware' - on my system.
I keep Adware installed, and I use Pop-Up Stopper, too. But somehow I ended up in deep trouble. The windows kept popping up, toolbars took up unwanted residence in my browser, a Trojan virus landed on my system, and so on. The infestation was nasty.
The next step was installing SpyBot Search and Destroy. It's free. And when you review the license agreement upon installation, you'll see the following:
I love both reasons. Of course, there is an art to superb clean, effective, and user-friendly software development. And it's an art that should bring in money to good developers. But, I still have to give him credit for noble notions.
Unfortunately, that didn't do the trick either. It would appear to clean up the problems, but upon relaunching a browser, the problems returned. The scumware was embedded deep.
Finally, I found my way to the SpyWare Warrior Forums - and found help under the guise of "Java, a warrior in training."
It took installing HiJackThis and RegEdit, a number of safe-mode boots, and dozens of file and key deletions to get things back under control. But with Java's help, I'm hopefully scumwarefree again.
Just in case, I've now got SpywareBuster installed now, as well as a firewall (which admittedly I should have had long before now).
As I read on one other scumware victim's thread, "protection is better than the cure."
It's a motto I'm taking to heart.
Now I can breathe easy and get back to knitting.
(Yes, while all those reboots and scans were going on, I've managed to almost finish the front of the Oriole vest. Hopefully will have pictures tomorrow.)
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