Hawk's Babble-Log

I’ve been helping a lot of friends clean their systems of crap. When I say “crap”, I mean malware. Malware is all kinds of bad software, such as spyware, adware, trojans, virii, keyloggers, and so on.

I’ve found that this collection of software seems to do the trick, if I can get to the system early enough. All but one machine so far (out of about five) could be cleaned without a complete Windows re-install.

Here’s the list of software I’ve used:

ClamWin, a free virus scanner:
[http://www.clamwin.com/](http://www.clamwin.com/)
[http://www.clamwin.com/content/view/18/46/](http://www.clamwin.com/content/view/18/46/)

Spybot Search and Destroy, catches many kinds of malware:
[http://safer-networking.net/](http://safer-networking.net/)
[http://safer-networking.net/en/download/index.html](http://safer-networking.net/en/download/index.html)

X-Cleaner, yet another malware cleaner:
[http://www.xblock.com](http://www.xblock.com)
[http://www.xblock.com/download-freeware.php](http://www.xblock.com/download-freeware.php)

Mike Lin’s Startup Control Panel:
[http://mlin.net/](http://mlin.net/)
[http://mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml](http://mlin.net/StartupCPL.shtml)

ClamWin is a good virus scanner, but it does take a while to run. I recommend you start it before you go to bed and let it go. I also recommend you turn on the option “only show infected files”. Otherwise, it will generate a list of every file on your machine while it’s scanning, which is kind of annoying.

So far, I found only one malware app which was not cleaned by Spybot, and X-Cleaner did the trick. So now I run both always. X-Cleaner is cripple-ware, meaning it’s not fully functional until you buy it. It’s very inexpensive for what it does, and I’ll probably end up buying it just to support these guys. But the most useful feature, the one on top of the list, works without you having to buy it. So I recommend you use that one, the one which protects IE’s homepage, and the one which checks for Windows Messenging Service.

Mike Lin’s Startup Control Panel is a nice little app which shows you what programs are starting up with your machine, and allows you to turn off, or disable, any of them. I use the standalone .EXE version (I’m a child of DOS, after all). It’s small, fast, and does exactly what it says it does. This little app has helped me to remove stuff which checks to see if you’ve still got malware installed, and if not, installs it again. It has helped me clean all of the systems I’ve worked on.

That’s it for now. I’ll post again if I find something else of value.