How To Get Rid Of Spyware And Other Nasties

March 5, 2008

So tonight I spent some time at a family member’s house, checking their PC for spyware and other nasties… You know I’ve been out of the day-to-day PC repair thing for a few years now… so I’m definitely not up on the popular spyware threat of the day. I couldn’t tell you what the name of the virus that infected the most systems last month. And while I know in some cases malware has gotten more sophisticated (i.e., blended threats), in a number of cases it’s just more of the same. For the most part, there really is nothing new under the sun!

It turned out my brother in law’s PC was fairly clean… SpyBot Search & Destroy did report a few instances of the Zlob trojan, and I also found a remnant of Virus Heat. What a devilish piece of malware that tool is… pretending to be a legitimate antispyware tool, Virus Heat is actually spyware in disguise, nagging you to fork over your credit card number to unlock the “critical features” of the bogus tool. What a sham.

At any rate, here’s what I did in looking at his PC…perhaps it will be helpful to some of you… Basically, I scanned his hard drives using multiple tools. I updated AdAware (free version) to the most recent signatures and ran that… came back clean. I also did the same with SpyBot…SpyBot takes a good 45 minutes or so to run on a modern Windows XP computer (I think they are up to something like 114,000 spyware checks), but it was well worth it as SpyBot was the one that found Zlob. Next, I ran the infamous HijackThis. Great tool, though you kind of need to know what you’re doing a little bit or you can do serious damage to your Windows installation…. HJT basically allows you to see each Windows service, registry “run” key, CLSID, and browser helper object that is installed on your PC… HJT also shows you the full path if applicable, and you have the option right within the program to remove or keep….This is actually how I found the remnant of Virus Heat (somehow one of its registered DLLs was hooked into Internet Explorer)…

Finally, for good measure, I downloaded the latest copy of Javacool’s Spyware Blaster. Classic tool…wish he updated and supported it more, but hey I’m not complaining….the stupid thing is free. Spyware Blaster is nice too because it has an immunizaiton feature (yeah yeah, I know Spybot does as well) that should keep some of the more common spyware threats away…

At any rate, that’s basically all I did and he’s now good as gold. Note this is not intended to be the “be all/end all” guide to removing malware from a Windows computer…so please don’t take it as such. But hopefully for some of you it provides some direction and at least a starting point…

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