So it finally happened -- my computer got hijacked by the scourge of Spyware that has given this entire medium one hell of a bad name and lingering hangover.
The story began on a Tuesday -- not unlike the one two days ago -- where someone in the Jaffe household inadvertently conjured up the dark spirits through the Ouija board commonly referred to as a keyboard.
As legend goes, it was either my 3-year old daughter who surfs at a frenzied pace on sites like mylittlepony.com or nickjr.com or my mother-in-law (and I mention her for two reasons: she is an avid reader of jaffe juice and I told her I'd mention her in one of my upcoming articles) who fell prey to the warning that the computer was not optimized, succumbed to the false promise of getting rid of pop-ups (as if), or just hit the wrong "x" at the wrong time.
The rest, as they say in the classics, was history.
Within two days, the computer was practically inoperable. Our homepage had been changed from msn.com to zestyfind.com. Our CPU was processing slower than the line moves at a local post office. Pop-up windows were spawning faster than popcorn kernels could ever aspire to explode. Hardcore porn forced me several times to cover the screen with my entire body in order to shield the XXX from my unsuspecting daughter.
The answer to the age old question, "Who owns the desktop?" had suddenly become a lot clearer: Certainly not me!
I was rendered practically helpless. I couldn't even get deep enough into download.com to install the latest antidotes (Spybot and Ad-Aware). In fact, the former link on download.com was corrupt -- or rather intentionally corrupted, I suspect. Ultimately, I found a mirror site somewhere in France.
After two to three days of frustrating trial and error -- which usually involved accessing the computer without an active Internet connection and constantly rebooting -- I ran Spybot and was greeted with…wait for it…170 different processes which spanned the gamut from malware to the good old fashioned tracking cookie.
Here are the results of my Spybot query (ahem):
Adtomi.YahooStocks
AlexaRelated
Bargain Buddy (6 occurrences)
BFast
BonziBuddy
Booked Space (4 occurrences)
ClickAgents
Coolwwwsearch
DSOExploit
DyFuCA.Internet Optimizer (8 occurrences)
DyFuCA (6 occurrences)
eAcceleration
eXact Search Bar (exact advertising)
eZulaHotText (69 occurrences)
FreeScratchandWin
Hotbar (6 occurrences)
IGetNet
KeenValue eUniverse
KeenValue.PerfectNav
nCase (180 solutions)
PeopleonPage
Spyhunter Popups
Travelocity
TurboDownload (6 occurrences)
Virtual Bouncer
VX2/e (direct revenue)
VX2/f
WildTangent
WebTrends
Now, whilst I have no idea how many of the above programs were already resident on my computer before the you-know-what hit the CPU fan, I can assure you that in no instances were any of the processes ever explicitly opted-in or condoned.
After running Spybot and Ad-Aware, executing the uninstall programs command off my control panel, and at times, literally deleting entire folders without any regard whatsoever for the after-effects of conducting open heart surgery without an anesthetic, the computer began to take on some degree of normalcy.
Grand prize, without question, went to eZula -- exceptionally difficult to uninstall. In fact, several times it politely reinstalled itself, much to my disdain and chagrin. Conspicuously absent were oft-talked about so-called offenders Claria and WhenU. Coincidence or not?
And so, it finally dawned on me why the first reaction from anyone asking me what I do for a living is, "so are you the guy responsible for all those pop-ups?" To anyone reading this who has hasn't experienced an infestation first-hand, I would recommend you subject yourself to this invasion of the barbarians (preferably on someone else's computer if possible) in order to really understand what we're up against.
If someone like myself, who is expected to be at least fairly "tech savvy," would have so much difficulty -- three full days worth-- eradicating such vermin, can you image how defenseless people like my mother-in-law are to the endless attacks of low-life?
In the case of this sample size of one, I was on the brink of reformatting my entire hard drive -- although I gladly settled for donating a few Jacksons (the new kind of course) to the friendly folk at Spybot for their no-strings-attached freeware.
What really struck me amidst all the tumult was the antithesis of the Lending Tree slogan, "when banks compete. you win" -- when adware vendors compete, you lose! Just like every other category in this world, there is only room at the top for a handful of players -- everyone and everything else is just noise.
Off to run another immunization/diagnostic check (sigh).
