Removal
Fortunately for all of us, the combination of malware, spam, and spyware has raised the cockles of more than just a few inspired and talented individuals and application developers. Over the past few years, TechRepublic has written several articles describing how to remove spyware and malware from infected systems. Many of those articles have mentioned the remarkable cleansing power you can bring to bear with the combination of Spybot Search & Destroy and Ad-aware. In my case, those two were extremely effective in removing the infestation.
For those TechRepublic members looking for a refresher on the general implementation of these applications, here is how the combination worked for me.
Firefox to the rescue
First, I borrowed a utility CD-ROM from a colleague. The utility CD had a copy of the latest version of Mozilla Firefox, which I quickly installed. Because most of the malware was tuned to the start of Microsoft Internet Explorer, I was able to access Download.com using Firefox?a normally simple thing made nearly impossible by the vindictive software I was trying to remove.
From Download.com, I acquired the latest versions of Spybot Search & Destroy and Ad-aware 6.0, which I quickly installed on the infected system. The initial Spybot routine found 79 questionable objects. After removing those offensive tidbits, I updated the reference file for Spybot and ran it again. This updated cleansing operation found another 25 objects to remove.
