Holy crap thats alot of spyware...

[brain29]

So my friend's girlfriend kept having problems with her laptop. It's probably 4 or 5 years old and it kept overheating. So she sent it in and had the fan replaced. When she got it back she wanted me to go through and get rid of all the spyware and whatnot because she kept getting popups. Well, first of all I dont think she had any MS patches of hotfixes installed, no antivirus (when she sent it in they got rid of 8 virii) and no popup blocker. '

I did the normal thing, run windows update, get all the updates and SP2 and install a good antivirus. Then I install AD-Aware. WOW. Full system scan brought up over 1,000 objects. That has to be some sort of record. All in all she is very happy now and can work on her computer without going insane

 

[Farvacola]

While for a personal computer that is a very large amount of spyware and malware, it is no record. My uncle owns a IT buisness that sets up servers and repairs them. Once, he cleanes out a doctors office server, and it had over over 1 million spywares and malwares on it. It was a very large office, but still, that is a crapload of crap!

 

[John]

You'll need to run more than Ad Aware to rid a system of spyware.

Read Shad's guide but add Spysweeper 3.2 to the list of programs

 

[Adn4n]

I found 12k on my friends computer.

 

[brain29]

yeah, im not going to run 4 different programs just for spyware. Call me stupid but on my laptop I run an antivirus, firewall, and adware once a week. (plus the occasional Spybot) and i have no problems. I have better things to do than scan my computer 4 times.

 

[Genx87]

You know I was on DSL for 3 years and never once ran anti-virus.

And when I got a copy of an Anti-virus program it found zero virus's on my computer. This tells me in a way virus's and spyware are related to what people do with their computer.

i.e opening up every attachment from joeblow038098q23@hahaha.com, going to websites that you dont know anything about. Installing all sorts of plugins and all the extras from applications like AIM and Yahoo msg.

I switched from IE6 to Firefox and the amount of spyware I find on my computer has dropped to about 10% of what is used to be.

 

[Jeff7]

Originally posted by: brain29
So my friend's girlfriend kept having problems with her laptop. It's probably 4 or 5 years old and it kept overheating. So she sent it in and had the fan replaced. When she got it back she wanted me to go through and get rid of all the spyware and whatnot because she kept getting popups. Well, first of all I dont think she had any MS patches of hotfixes installed, no antivirus (when she sent it in they got rid of 8 virii) and no popup blocker. '

I did the normal thing, run windows update, get all the updates and SP2 and install a good antivirus. Then I install AD-Aware. WOW. Full system scan brought up over 1,000 objects. That has to be some sort of record. All in all she is very happy now and can work on her computer without going insane

Wow, and I thought 600 was a lot (someone's PC I worked on recently). How long did it take for her PC to boot, 3 hours??

yeah, im not going to run 4 different programs just for spyware. Call me stupid but on my laptop I run an antivirus, firewall, and adware once a week. (plus the occasional Spybot) and i have no problems. I have better things to do than scan my computer 4 times.

But if you're careful, you won't need to anyway. Too many people will download and run everything they can find. That PC I mentioned before - its owners installed AOL (3 versions), Earthlink, Netzero, and Juno. Why? A CD came in the mail, so might as well put it on the computer.

 

[GreatBarracuda]

Usually when I have this much junk, I would just format it!

 

[randomlinh]

Originally posted by: Genx87
And when I got a copy of an Anti-virus program it found zero virus's on my computer. This tells me in a way virus's and spyware are related to what people do with their computer.

and we have a winner! This is exactly it. That and people are not familiar with how some of these pop ups look very much like real dialog boxes. and one click is all it takes....

the upside to all this is occasionally I get money for doing spyware removal for folks



oh, you're also lucky sp2 installed w/o a hitch... an unclean install could be deadly.

 

[shimsham]

Originally posted by: Genx87
You know I was on DSL for 3 years and never once ran anti-virus.

And when I got a copy of an Anti-virus program it found zero virus's on my computer. This tells me in a way virus's and spyware are related to what people do with their computer.

i.e opening up every attachment from joeblow038098q23@hahaha.com, going to websites that you dont know anything about. Installing all sorts of plugins and all the extras from applications like AIM and Yahoo msg.

I switched from IE6 to Firefox and the amount of spyware I find on my computer has dropped to about 10% of what is used to be.

same thing here.

 

[Bateluer]

I think I found more than 33k on my sister's computer last year with just Ad Aware.

 

[NYHoustonman]

Highest I've run into is 2-point-something instances.