C
Chuck Hildebrandt
I read a story about Bittorrent on NYTimes.com and decided I would download
it. I went to Download.com and did so, and installed it. I clicked on the
option to install a search function, which I assumed was a search function
for the program. For some reason this did not raise enough of a red flag,
so I clicked OK.
Immediately, I started noticing funny things happening that suggest that I
might have downloaded spyware instead.
- I got this floating bar on my desktop with a search function, which I did
not recognize and don;t want.
- It rearranged all my Favorites and installed 8 or 10 new folders for
"Favorites" such as Adult site, Adult entertainment, games, etc. (NOTE:
Separately, I downloaded Internet Organizer 2 (from Netherlands, I think) to
rearrange my Favorites bar when I saw this had happened, and I don;t know
what this piece of crap may have done to my machine.)
- It placed icons on my desktop for all these same thing.
- Every time I go to a site that's not operational, instead of a standard
404 page, I am redirected to a page in my IE temp folder named
"nurbBrowsesafe.htm" which is a "portal" page with redirects to numerous
sleazy and suspicious sites.
- Every time I boot up, my browser's homepage is hijacked through a page at
"searchexe.com", which then display a "toolbar" at the bottom of my browser
with links to these same suspicious sites.
- Numerous folders and exe's were loaded into my Program Files folder, with
names such as "winactive", "thunksend", "drive bags", "extra" and
"beeptray". I googled all these terms and only "winactive" appears -- all
the others appear with no results.
- My Spybot Search and Destroy find *nothing* suspicious on my C drive
anymore, not even cookies from Doubleclick, advertising.com, internetfuel,
etc.
- Also, there is this on DLL file placed on my machine called "Media
Rule.dll" which, since it always seems to be in use, I am not allowed to
delete from my machine, and I can't figure out how to stop it from running,
other than to wipe it out of my registry (which I just did).
The most disturbing thing about all this is I can find nothing on Google
about so many of these programs and folders. I would have thought all these
would have been discovered and discussed by now.
Does anybody recognize this at all? Please help!
Thanks.
Chuck
it. I went to Download.com and did so, and installed it. I clicked on the
option to install a search function, which I assumed was a search function
for the program. For some reason this did not raise enough of a red flag,
so I clicked OK.
Immediately, I started noticing funny things happening that suggest that I
might have downloaded spyware instead.
- I got this floating bar on my desktop with a search function, which I did
not recognize and don;t want.
- It rearranged all my Favorites and installed 8 or 10 new folders for
"Favorites" such as Adult site, Adult entertainment, games, etc. (NOTE:
Separately, I downloaded Internet Organizer 2 (from Netherlands, I think) to
rearrange my Favorites bar when I saw this had happened, and I don;t know
what this piece of crap may have done to my machine.)
- It placed icons on my desktop for all these same thing.
- Every time I go to a site that's not operational, instead of a standard
404 page, I am redirected to a page in my IE temp folder named
"nurbBrowsesafe.htm" which is a "portal" page with redirects to numerous
sleazy and suspicious sites.
- Every time I boot up, my browser's homepage is hijacked through a page at
"searchexe.com", which then display a "toolbar" at the bottom of my browser
with links to these same suspicious sites.
- Numerous folders and exe's were loaded into my Program Files folder, with
names such as "winactive", "thunksend", "drive bags", "extra" and
"beeptray". I googled all these terms and only "winactive" appears -- all
the others appear with no results.
- My Spybot Search and Destroy find *nothing* suspicious on my C drive
anymore, not even cookies from Doubleclick, advertising.com, internetfuel,
etc.
- Also, there is this on DLL file placed on my machine called "Media
Rule.dll" which, since it always seems to be in use, I am not allowed to
delete from my machine, and I can't figure out how to stop it from running,
other than to wipe it out of my registry (which I just did).
The most disturbing thing about all this is I can find nothing on Google
about so many of these programs and folders. I would have thought all these
would have been discovered and discussed by now.
Does anybody recognize this at all? Please help!
Thanks.
Chuck