This is not my blog.

I do regular maintenance on my dad's computer and last night I went to check it out and saw a dialog box popping up from the system tray notifying him of spyware items found by a program called "Malware Crush 3.7." I do most of dad's software installs and updates so I was immediately suspicious because I already had SystemSuite 6 and Spybot - Search and Destroy installed on his machine and didn't recognize this new anti-spyware program. I did a quick googlesearch on Malware Crush and three Yahoo Answers articles immediately popped up (article 1, article 2, and article 3). One of the descriptions of this program was:

MalwareCrush 3.7 is the latest representative of VirusBurst and SpyLocked family. Russian hackers made some redesign, but these programs still bear a great resemblance to each other. MalwareCrush can silently install itself (using Zlob.Trojan) and then bombard your PC with fake spyware detection warnings, security alerts, tray balloon notifications and may goad you into purchasing the commercial version of MalwareCrush. In addition it will open browser security holes and transfer your private data (credit card numbers, PayPal access information) to special servers, so remote attackers can steal your money. This fake anti-malware has its own well-designed and rated high in all major search-engines web-page that means that plenty of PC users have already installed this parasite on their hard drives.

Hmmm ... Russian software masked as fake anti-spyware? That doesn't sound very good at all! There were several descriptions of very lengthy processes by which to remove the malicious software (which is now being called malware I have learned) that sounded very time consuming and unappealing. Several people in the Yahoo forum suggested using some free software called SUPERAntiSpyware which just sounded fishy to me (as in, "how convenient that this one program can remove software that nobody else seems to be able to deal with"). Thus, I decided to start by downloading the updates for a free program that I usually use called Spybot - Search and Destroy and trying that.

Spybot didn't do the trick after rebooting so I bit the bullet after reading a few more reviews of SUPERAntiSpyware and went ahead and downloaded it. Lo and behold, after rebooting it worked and the program did not come back to reassert itself like it did after Spybot cleaned things up. So it appears to be true, the anti-spyware program with the most suspicious name actually worked. For a description of "spyware" and "adware" click here. In the mean time, keep your eye out for this crap and keep your computer locked down with a firewall and don't run programs without knowing what they do. Spyware can rip off you financial information, account passwords, and all sorts of other sensitive information. It took me several hours to get rid of this crap on my dad's computer and I don't even know how he got it. So be careful!

Labels: news