Yesterday I spent quite a few hours removing yet another incident of Spyware Guard 2008 (see December 18 blog post below). This is one of the family of vicious rogue programs that is wrecking systems all over the place.
In this case I was pretty much able to tell that it was acquired from a rather bad web site. If you have kids in the house who just don't understand the dangers that are lurking out there, you need to talk to them about the risks they are taking by visiting web sites they should not be visiting.
It took my whole arsenal of weapons to get rid of it. I needed Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware, SuperAntispyware, Spybot, AVG Free Anti-virus, MSCONFIG, CCleaner, and a couple of other tools that I don't recommend for general users, like HijackThis and Tune-Up Utilities. For future defensive reasons on this particular customer system, I downloaded and installed Windows Defender and the HOSTS file I preach about so much.
As for the latter, I will soon post an item on how to get, install, and use the HOSTS file. This is a very important and integral part of what should be your defense against the bad guys out there.
In the meantime, be careful of the places you go and the things you download.
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