Time to switch your OS

Got your own spyware horror story?

Our family came home one night close to 10 p.m. When we got inside, my wife headed for the PC, and my 11-year-old headed upstairs. My wife logged on to her account, and the system froze on a blank Internet Explorer window. We called our son downstairs and proceeded with an acute grilling session, trying to figure out where he had been on the glorious World Wide Web. Apparently, he had been surfing sites looking for cheat codes for his PlayStation 2.

Well, the XP box got a hard shutdown and a reboot to Safe Mode. When I opened up my wife's user account, about 20 icons on the desktop had appeared since I left for work that morning. I ran a virus scan with Norton AntiVirus, which found and removed nine Trojan horses. I proceeded to Trend Micro's site and ran a free online scan; the site found another 28 problems but only removed 27. Then I ran Webroot Spy Sweeper, which found and removed several more adware and spyware components. Three hours into the ordeal, I uninstalled Norton and Webroot and installed Panda Platinum Internet Security 2006. After I updated it and ran a complete scan, the application discovered 69 more items none of the other programs had detected. Panda neutralized them all. It turns out my kid put a desktop hijacker called SpySheriff on the computer.

The next time I have to format that hard drive, I plan to load Linux onto it.

-Basil
Texas, U.S.A.

Reply from the Download.com editors:

We've received a fair amount of complaints from our users regarding SpySheriff. Most reports indicate SpySheriff is a rogue antispyware application designed to trick users into forking over cash due to false positives it detects on a machine. For more information on these types of unscrupulous programs, check out Spyware Warrior's list of rogues.

As many people who have tangled with spyware can tell you, it often takes a variety of products and multiple scans to totally cleanse a computer. This is often because antispyware vendors use different definitions files, but antispyware tools also often identify and enumerate spyware components in different ways. Regardless, we always suggest having more than one protective program at your disposal and employing them all when you suspect you've been infected.

You also make a good point that Linux (and Mac) users are currently immune to spyware--at least for the time being.