The Devil And Mr. Bill
I didn't have time to write yesterday...when I sat down at the computer I became embroiled in a battle with the spawn of Satan...and the battle still rages on.
Some pernicious spyware keeps sending giant pop up ads before me from something called "Aurora - a better Internet."
I'm a fairly tech-savvy guy - although Amy will occasionally mock my efforts - at least when it comes to software irregularities. I also run most of the conventional and some less conventional anti-virus, pop-up blocker, firewall type stuff - I'd refer to that stuff in more geeky terms to prove my technical prowess but I don't want to go over the heads of any readers (ahem).
Anyway, I don't know when this particular obnoxious entity got on my computer but it must have activated when I turned my computer on after shutting down due to a thunderstorm yesterday - yes, we actually got rain in South Texas! It's raining now too for the first time in many months...which is perfect considering Amy is the Matron of Honor in an outdoor wedding later today.
Today's rain...tomorrow's blog fodder.
I tried removing Aurora with the usual tools - Spybot and Ad-Aware. I even ran a full virus scan. No luck...it kept coming back. I mean every 10 seconds another giant ad appears.
I went digging on the Internet and found some highly complex "fixes" which spooked me a bit, but I even ran a couple of those. At first, I'd think I'd won the battle - I'd reboot and get an error message indicating Windows couldn't find "nail.exe" which I've determined is a component at least partially responsible for this "better Internet" crap. Moments later though another ad would pop up.
Then I pulled out the big guns...I did a system restore, rolling my computer back a month or so, only to find that "Aurora - a better Internet" apparently transcends hard drive space and time. Have I mentioned I started this battle at around eight Friday night and it was now around midnight?
The Romans referred to the goddess of dawn as "Aurora”, which suddenly became ironic since I became aware I would be battling this demon until the daylight hours and beyond.
I was desperate...when in a battle with Satan sometimes there is only one entity you can call on...one person so entrenched in the forces of darkness that invoking his name alone provokes a response...yes, I bowed my head and decided to go into allegiance with...Bill Gates.
I downloaded Microsoft's Beta spyware removal tool. I decided to let it run overnight and come to deal with the issue this morning...this also allowed me to spend the rest of the evening in devout prayer seeking forgiveness for becoming Microsoft dependent.
So far Microsoft has found and eradicated "Aurora" at least eight times...each requiring a reboot of the system...and each time I think I've won...up it pops again.
I've set the anti spyware program to run repeatedly today and am simply going to abandon the computer for now.
Instead I'm going to enjoy the rain...besides I've got a wedding to prepare for...where's my umbrella?
posted by Michael
©The Main Point by Michael Main
7 Comments
7 Comments:
gee, I call my daughter "Aurora" in my blog (alias name)....I only called her that because she was born in Alaska. Maybe I should change her name.....she isn't scary, though...just a nice girl :)
Here's a tiny little tech tip... go to www.trendmicro.com and run the housecall scan. It will scan for viruses and spyware and catches things most other scans miss.
Good luck with your battle!
Because of a friend who stayed with us for a while and browsed dating websites etc.. we found out today by sheer agony she'd infected our computer with a virus as well as 50 Plus SPY programs and spybots. ugh. What a mess that was.
I was aware of Housecall...although I hadn't tried it, I'm running it now simply because I'm freakin' paranoid.
I came across a program called "ewido" which allows a 15 day free trial which once I updated it appears to have both disinfected and "blocked" "Aurora". I hesitate to say that but I've brought up several web pages now and no giant pop up ads have show up, so I'm optimistic.
I'm sure Spybot and Adaware will address this thing soon but I can not for the life of me see why advertisers would choose this method. There is no product on earth I would buy as a result of adware that is so devious it takes a fairly computer literate guy (hey I even do a daily computer feature on the radio) nearly a full day to eliminate.
It's like having a door to door salesman think he's going to succeed by loosing a skunk in my house so I couldn't forget the smell of him.
The logic escapes me.
Anyway Ewido is the only program I found that seems to have actually blocked this booger and that's only after I updated it to the very latest version.
Whether it all reappears once my 15 day trial is over is another matter.
In case you have more problems, I suggest you download HijackThis from www.majorgeeks.com and run a scan. When the scan button changes to "log", highlight and copy the log and post it in one of the anti-spyware forums, such as www.spywareinfo.com. The knowledgable people there will help you clean out all of the baddies. Beware: Some of the things that HijackThis lists are necessary for your computer to run. Unless you know what you're doing, let the people on the forum tell you what to fix.
:The logic escapes me.
If they succeed with just one person in a thousand, well, they've infested a few MILLION computers, so they make a profit. And it's cheap.
Check out http://www.aumha.org for a very good intro to fighting malware. Their forum is a decent place to ask questions, too.
The Spybot Search & Destroy developer team hangs out on:
http://www.net-integration.net
I also hang out on a private news server (anybody can - it's just not "usenet prime") where there are several computer related groups. They talk about computer security, privacy, spam, hardware, software, you name it. There's even a group or two for Linux folks. The news server is news.grc.com. I'm pretty sure Outlook Express will handle more than one news server. I KNOW that Thunderbird will :-)
The sponsor, Steve Gibson, is a computer programmer. There are a lot of computer professionals on the site, and they're pretty friendly.
Hope this helps!
~ Rosanne
I had the same problem a while back. It was a horrible experience for me because I'm not "tech savy" like some I know.
I did a restore also and through it all, I was led to believe that it was because I was using IE 6 provided by Bill Gates that the evil code found access to my computer. I switched to Firefox for a while. Eventually I managed to download and install all of the Microsoft service packages and only then did I fire up a new version of IE browser. I have had no new problems with such pop-ups. Thank God!
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