The From Family.com

My laptop was sick yesterday with a spy-ware-virus combo attack. Mainly ‘Vista Anti Virus 2008′ along with ‘Zlob’ mal-ware. Just awful. Every time Internet Explorer launched everything got wrecked again…

No Money Required Steps I did to recover ->

Free: Spybot Search and Destroy helped stop some of the infection. At least to make the pc sort of use-able.

Free: RRT (Remove Restrictions Tool) recovered my hidden c:\ drive, taskmanager, etc… (Then I was able to manually delete the vav.exe files to stop that part of the pain.)

Free: The Safari browser that comes with iTunes helped for web research. (Since Internet Explorer was toast, and when opened it re-infected everything.)

Free: Roguefix  cured everything. The best place for this attack-recovery. Super informative. 

Free: SUPERAntiSpyware for a final deep scrubbing. Everything looks ok now, but this app still found one more trojan dropper after 3+ hrs of scanning. 

It took me way too long to recover since most Free software gives you a long in-depth scan for an hour, tells you that ‘Yes, you are infected!’ (already knew that…), and for $30 bucks they might be able to fix it. Going through the mega-scan in a corrupted slow system is so painful…. afterwards when they ask for money I am completely not interested. More likely to do a full windows re-install.  

Overall it was a hard reminder on why a person should never have unprotected surfing.

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