Adware Stealing My Computer, Money and Precious Time

Filed in archive General on February 7, 2008

What a bad day I had yesterday. Somewhere along the way I hit a Web site that forced malware/adware onto my computer. If you've never had this happen to you, it's bad. And it's not hard to do.

There are many sites out there set up to look legitimate, but as you surf around, clicking a link on one of these sites could actually lead to malicious programs being set up on your computer. In my experience, it's not computer-killing viruses they're trying to stick you with, but instead "adware" - software that constantly (and I mean constantly) shows pop-up advertising for everything imaginable, from bad credit loans to travel "deals" to sex sites. This time I got stuck from adware from a "company" called Outerinfo, which actually has a Web site that tries to pretend as though they are a legitimate business. If I could get my hands on anyone from Outerinfo....

But it appears that many other goodies were packed in as well. One such program sends ads that overlay the ads seen on legitimate Web sites. At one point I thought my computer was clean until I noticed the big ad on Yahoo's front page featured a woman doing weird things in lingerie. I know Yahoo's having business issues, but I'm still pretty sure they haven't sunk that far.

And my computer had slowed to a c r a w l . . . barely working.

For the last two days I have been trying in vain to clean my computer. These adware things are very, very difficult to get rid of. They're written in such a way that even if an antivirus program cleans them all off, they're back again as soon as you re-boot your computer. I'm no computer whiz, but I've gathered it has something to do with the registry that your computer uses to boot up successfully. Until you clean off the offending lines of code, things don't improve. Do you think I know how to find the offending lines of code? You're right; I do not. And no spam-fighting, adware-fighting, spyware-fighting software I've come across has been able to do it 100% of the time, either.

This has been a colossal waste of my time and money, as I did end up purchasing a piece of software that had successfully helped me last time this happened (I used the free trial version last time). This time it couldn't do the job. Very frustrating.

There's still some bad stuff on my computer. I've managed to do a workaround so I can still use it, but even though in the past I've prided myself on solving these situations, this one might require a call to the Geek Squad.