Well, all of my previous predictions turned out wrong. Even the "safe assumptions."
Yesterday, at about 11:45am I became the victim of SpyFalcon. If you haven't heard of this... program... then good for you. I hope you never encounter it. I also hope that someday I encounter the person(s) responsible for coding this. In that situation, I would do what Marsellus Wallace would do. Let me tell you why.
SpyFalcon was disguised as a little program which I intentionally downloaded, hoping to have another video codec to use when converting video files from one format to another. The website from whence it came was dubious, so I exercised some caution. Norton detected nothing during the download, and I even manually scanned the file. Well, as soon as I double-clicked that .exe file I knew something was wrong: it had disappeared.
Then SpyFalcon, a supposed anti-adware program, was launched from my computer. I knew I had installed no such program. It told me that my computer was infected with adware, and if I followed some website and upgraded to a fancy version of SpyFalcon, my problem would be solved. Sure enough, every 30 seconds icons would flash messages from my system tray (the bottom right corner next to the clock in Windows XP) and pop-up ads (some pornographic) would appear. My web browsers were formatted to use some supposed security site as homepages, and threw more pop-ups at me. Hyunmi can attest to this, as she saw me cursing and struggling to get rid of it. Getting hard work done on a computer with this problem is nigh impossible.
I uninstalled SpyFalcon, yet all of the pop-ups and web browser mishaps continued. I found the processes responsible, but killing them was useless; they restarted instantly. I couldn't delete the files because they were in use. Norton found nothing, so that was useless. AdAware couldn't do anything either.
Some searching told me that my registry and Windows System32 folders were infected as well (which I suspected). After trying a number of approaches, including legitimate 3rd party software (which detects SpyFalcon, but will only delete it if you purchase an upgrade), I finally found a program that a French guy wrote. It worked. And I only wasted 6 hours of my day.
Then, I continued to get pop-up ads.
SpyFalcon was kind enough to install software from outerinfo.com, an ad website, naturally. (Do not visit this website.) Funny, but they have an uninstall tool for their software. The only way to get rid of there virus-like adware was to use their uninstall software. How can that be legal?
At that point, even though I was victorious, I was tired from battling villains on par with rapists and drug dealers. I finished up a few things at lab and had a quick dinner before picking up Yilin at her class. So no relaxing for me.
Oh yeah, I also caught a cold yesterday. Yilin told me this morning that she feels sick, too. Great. Computer virus and rhinovirus, all in one day.
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3 comments:
I tried to comment, but the little word verifier thing insisted I was not typing in the correct letters when I really was. I tried five times. So now, that comment is lost, and this is all you're getting.
Josh, I'm sorry, that sounds very frustrating. I had a similar mishap when I was in undergrad and had to go to extremes to fix it. I hope you and Yilin are feeling better. Drink your fluids!
Dan, word verifier is the devil. I have a hard time reading the letters b/c they are usually so close together.
you had a sneaky computer gnome. It is evil and can only be rid of once you obtain the Dark Crystal from the evil Skekses and find the missing shard with the help of Jen. So scary...
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