Three Years of Hell to Become the Devil: With the pricking of my thumb...

Today, with the workload ramping up and my sanity slipping, was not the day I needed computer problems. I've talked to two other students here at Columbia who've been hit with the same trojan horse. The symptoms are annoying and obvious: I've found at least seven different types of spyware installed on my PC. Both of my fellow sufferers had the same spyware, which suddenly appeared on their computers.

If you suddenly find yourself being deluged with pop-up ads or strange search bars appearing on your computer, the following might be helpful:
a) Run your virus scanner. If you're at the law school, a free version of Symantec anti-virus software can be downloaded from the school's website. (If you don't know where that is, email me.)
b) Get LavaSoft's Ad-Aware, make sure to update it once installed, and run it. Don't be surprised to see 100+ pieces of spyware.
c) Get Spybot Search and Destroy, update it, and run it. Again, don't be surprised by over 100 pieces of spyware.

I don't know who created this garbage, but I really hope something nasty and litigious happens to them.

UPDATE: It seems that the vile scumware installed on my machine, and a few others around here, is Ezula. Removal instructions for it may be found here. Since I never accept 'free software downloads,' I'm unclear as how it got on here, but it's vile. Basically, even if you uninstall the software in your Add/Remove Programs dialogue box, it will recur, because Ezula places an executable in C:/WINDOWS and sets a registry key that reinstalls the software in the background without user intervention.

You'll find that when you try to uninstall some of this software, it asks you several times if you REALLY WANT to lose the IMPORTANT BENEFITS that it gives you. One particularly insidious search bar makes you confirm three times that you want to remove it, and the answers to the questions phrased such that the 'correct' answers are YES, NO, and YES.

I really didn't need to spend 1.5 hours figuring this out just before finals. Considering that I never installed this software, I really hope that some nasty litigation drives these jerks into legal oblivion.

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Giving The Devil His Due

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amen to that, brother!

Posted by: Katherine | April 12, 2004 4:48 PM

Hi, me again. I recently used the utilities you've linked here to "clean up" my laptop and they worked like a charm. I also used a nifty little utility called Autoruns, which shows you what programs on your machine are configured to run at startup (http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/autoruns.shtml).

Posted by: Sabir | April 12, 2004 9:56 PM

I'm not familiar with Ezula, but it's probably a piece of nastiness that installs on a drive-by basis without even telling you that it does. If you're using Internet Exploiter as your default browser, Spybot Search and Destroy has a setting that innoculates your machine against most spyware, and you can also set it to give you a head's up when it's blocking the install of spyware. Set it to notify you as an exercise sometime (after finals, you've got more on your plate than you can say grace over now) and you'll be surprised at the websites which try to instally crap on your machine without your knowledge. I agree with your sentiment that somethng nasty and litigious befall them; mere death isn't nearly as painful as they deserve.

Posted by: Len Cleavelin | April 13, 2004 3:10 PM

With the pricking of my thumb...

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Giving The Devil His Due

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