| Vigilance I regret to announce that I let my guard down against this kind of malware. As a result I'm going to have to reinstalled Windows. 
I don't recall which spyware was installed -- I wish that I did so that I could report it here -- but it took more than 3 hours to make the system usable enough to recover some key data. (Knoppix not withstanding.)
The intrusion enabled RPC and Remote Registry services, installed itself as a service, and disabled the 'Properties' form/window for managing services. It replaced the explorer.exe (desktop) and regedit.exe files. It installed a half dozen of its own programs, and completely took over any reasonable functionality of IE.
In a final act of "let's really screw with this guy" it "knows" the firefox.com web pages well enough that, although it would let me get to the firefox site and download their pages, the "download" link wasn't displayed!
All-in-all, it made for a pretty bad day.
sigh.....  |
