OT: Microsoft is really annoying

[Bob Sneidar]

Hi Wilhelm. 

I know pretty much why all of these things you mentioned work the way they do but I will not go into that here. What you have is a particularly nasty flavor of spyware, that has several processes that checks up on the other bits of itself to make sure you don't do exactly what you are doing. When they detect that you are attempting to remove the other pieces they simply restore them. 

There are a couple of approaches I could recommend, but none of them are guaranteed to succeed, at least not completely. Once you get a bug like this, only a wipe (including deleting the partition and creating a new one) and reinstall of the OS is going to guarantee success. 

If you take that approach, let me make a few suggestions: 
1. Buy and have ready a good Antivirus/antispyware package to install IMMEDIATELY as soon as your new OS boots

2. Install XP sp2 or higher (avoid Vista just because it sucks, Win 7 is great) to make sure the Windows Firewall is on by default. If you do not have these, as many old restore disks will not, then do not connect to ANY internet connection until you have enabled the Windows firewall and installed the AV package as described above. 

3. At this point you *should* be safe enough to connect to the internet and download and install ALL the Windows Updates you find. This process can take 3 to 5 passes. Be patient. Do not give up. Your computer needs to be fully patched before you do anything else. 

4. Several things to keep in mind after you are up and running:
	a. Stay away from questionable sites. I don't need to elaborate. Organized Crime pays good programmers to develop undetectable bugs. 
	b. Never EVER click a link in an Email, no matter WHO sends you the email. Spam software can make an email look like it came from anyone. 
	c. NEVER install software that you haven't paid money for. Nothing is free. NOTHING. 
	d. Turn off the preview pane in your email, at least until you have trained your spam blocker about what is crap and what is not. 
	e. Use a non-administrator account as much as possible. Yes it's a pain, but you've done half the hackers work for them by using an admin account. 
	f. NEVER let anyone you do not trust implicitly, use (and especially "fix") your computer with the admin account. This includes your wife, kids and family pet. Especially not the kids. More compromises happen because an unwitting friend installs bad software to "fix" an ailing computer, than I can tell you about. 

That about sums it up. If all that seems unreasonable, I would suggest looking into the Apple OS X. Nothing is perfect, but real exploits for this OS are very rare, and there are none I know about presently that a fully patched OS can be compromised by. I am an IT pro and I have to live and work in both worlds. Most of my time is spent fixing and protecting the Windows side of things. 

Bob


On Apr 15, 2010, at 1:44 PM, Wilhelm Sanke wrote:

> The subject of this thread - which was started by me - sounds somewhat harsh and unfair, but the ongoing story of annoying popups of phony messages transported by the Microsoft Internet Explorer - without having been launched by me in each case - reminds me of the fight between Microsoft and the EU - the European Union - about forcing Microsoft to deliver a Windows platform that is not necessarily tied to an embedded Internet Explorer. At the moment I am not fully clear about the outcome of the fight. I remember that Microsoft should pay an amount of several million dollars, but I do not know, whether they have paid this sum and at the same time have changed their strategy.

> <snip>