MTS:Infectious Spyware Disease assimulates Firefox

[BlazeHedgehod]

So, in my Mom's quest to get taken by banner advertisements for things like SmileyCentral ("But they look so cool!"), she installed it. SmileyCentral comes with a bit of spyware called MyWebSearch.

Normally, I wouldn't care. She can ruin IE all she wants anymore. But I discovered that, as Firefox's popularity increases, so does the amount of morons who subjegate it's security - that is to say, the MyWebSearch toolbar has wormed it's way into Firefox and I cannot get rid of it. Unfortuntely, it appears to be spreading it's sickness and Firefox is now turning up visual errors if I open a new window. I can delete the DLL for it, but that still leaves it's entry under "TOOLBARS" and the visual errors persist. (However, enabling the toolbar when there is no DLL creates a blank square where it should be, with Firefox's "BROKEN PLUGIN!" image)

Obviously the solution to this is a fresh Firefox install - but before I do that - I want to get rid of this turd. AdAware seems to ignore it.

Any help you guys can provide?

[Kyoma]

I assume you tried this but..
Often these websites have a way to uninstall the things from the very website that gave you it..
But I doubt I've helped you any.

[突貫 (Tokkan)]

Bah, I once one of those "MySearch" whatever Spywares. I eventually got rid of it, but it just kept coming back, so I had the computer get a full format and then reinstalled Windows. Hasn't come back in over half a year.


...



Is your mother really that naïve?

[Squiggles the Chao]

Simply put, you may be able to fix it (though it may have replaced files like user.js and other user customization scripts to the point where you should probably just reinstall) by deleting the malicious files in the profile (which is located in C:\WINDOWS\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\(randomly generated string).default). However, unless you revoke certain permissions on the machine from your mother, it's probably going to happen again. And this stuff doesn't only effect Web Browsers, I've seen adware programs, vying for control over your Internet connection (proxy and etc.) completely hose the TCP/IP stack, and they definitely use up resources. If your mother is going to continue to use IE, and download such applications, it is best that she doesn't have the permissions to install software. In Windows XP, the default user accounts are administrator accounts. If you create a separate account for her which is not an administrator account, it will reduce the damage that she can do to the machine.

[SoNick Belmont]

Yeah, I have my siblings running restricted user accounts, and it's saved me a whole lot of time that would have spent removing things. Sure, they still have a few things that they shouldn't have, but I just make sure that I have "Show hidden and system files" checked, then go into the folders for their browser cache and delete everything. Oh, and Spyware scans every four or five days have helped, too, but I wouldn't suggest that if it's only one person that's running IE.

EDIT: Forgot to remove a sentence after adding one.

[BlazeHedgehod]

Well, she uninstalled it and I ran the computer over with AdAware and SpySweeper. SpySweeper was advertised to be the only spyware removal tool to get rid of the remnants of MyWebSearch, so I should be clean enough.