I still hate spyware

Posted in Computers & Internet on 4 Nov 2005.
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Some months ago I wrote about the agonies of cleaning spyware off my daughter’s computer.

Not long after, the dreaded lop.com ‘miraculously’ appeared again. I finally found some time to do something about it today.

Last time, the lop.com site (actually, m2media.com) provided a cleaning tool (after claiming falsely that you could ‘easily remove the lop toolbar using Add/Remove Programs…’). I couldn’t find the tool on their site any more, so I…

tried Spybot Search and Destroy (no joy),
downloaded Trend Micro Antispyware (it found plenty of suspect cookies, but failed to find lop.com)
downloaded SpySweeper. This one found lop.com (gave it ‘high red alert’ status) and removed it - but destroyed itself in the process (gave a ‘application has corrupted’ message then froze).

Anyway, the good news is that…

all the unwanted search toolbars are gone,
all the hijacked browser home pages are back to normal (lop gives you advertising pages instead of what you have chosen as a homepage) - including in Firefox (before it only affected IE)
All the annoying advertising popups are gone
all the unwanted bookmarked gambling and adult sites are gone

Until next time, at least.

My advice: Don’t download MSNPlus - that is where this lop rubbish comes from.

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