Fighting the Black Death

It is well known that the great Plague was carried to Europe by fleas on the backs of rats. It is thought to have started in central Asia, where people eventually learned to avoid it by looking for the tell-tail signs of plague infestation and acting accordingly. The poor Europeans, however, unaware of the causes of the disease, fell victim to it's horrible consequences.

In the modern age we are likewise plagued by a daily, electronic assault of malicious code, meant to gum up our workings with spyware, malware and all sorts of ill-conceived constructs. Like the Asians and Middle-Easterners of old, the web-savy surfer knows the tell-tail signs of viruses and trojan horses and wisely avoids them. Woe to the innocent internet neophytes who blindly click on random pop-up windows that proclaim "YOU HAVE MALWARE ON YOUR COMPUTER! CLICK HERE TO REMOVE"

That would be my wife.

About a week ago she opened the doors to a particularly stubborn bit of spyware called Antivirus XP 2008. I've been doing battle with it all day, but it has the annoying habit of throwing the entire system into a tizzy, resulting in the blue screen of death any time any of my legit anti-spyware tools start to close in on it.

I don't mean to be overly critical of my wife. She didn't know. It's just one of those things.

The only good news is that the machine in question is my Mom's old PC (she gave it to us over the summer) which, despite being newer and faster than our former PC tower, had some annoying glitches to begin with. So if it doesn't clean out... no great loss.

******

11:30 p.m. Update - Well the battle was finally won, but only after consulting multiple forums and trying a number of procedures that involved starting the computer in safe mode, digging into msconfig and registry settings, playing with dangerous tools... like HijackThis. Ultimately I found a little thing called ComboFix that people were saying would do the trick but "MUST BE USED UNDER EXPERT SUPERVISION! MAKE MULTIPLE BACK-UPS OF YOUR CONFIGURATION FIRST! Yadda yadda yadda. Well, you know me... I throw caution to the wind where technology is concerned. I dowloaded this little baby, opened it up, and it pretty much just ran itself. ten minutes later, my PC was back to normal.

Go figure.

As a parting thought, I'll tell you one of the more genius bit of chaos built into this strain of internet devilry: Amognst other things, Antivirus XP 2008 replaces your desktop picture with a permanent bluescreen + warning window with active/clickable areas that lead to more mischief.... but the real fun is the way it replaces your screen saver with a fake "blue screen of death"... complete with error message. If you nudge the machine out of it, it first goes through an animaiton that looks like the Windows startup screen. Hence, you think you're rebooting. The whole thing is meant to fake you into thinking your system froze... and by the time you see your desktop return, chances are you've already hit CTR-ALT-DEL. I didn't figure it out for hours.

So all this time when I thought my anti-spyware tools were crashing, they weren't. It's just that they take a long time to scan, and inevitably the screen saver would kick in. I would see it, utter some curse words, and hit the front reset button... in effect interrupting the scan and starting over.

Bastards.