Bloody Spyware
So how do you convince a now 15 year old that downloading “free” music and other choice programs to save a few quid is not a good idea? Maybe getting infected with spyware might stop them. The type of spyware that requires a full reformat and losing all of said downloaded material. As there are just too many infections to pick material out from. Sadly no. They go straight back to whence they came to get back the music and files you just scrubbed because they ‘need it’. Less than 12 hours later you’re back to square one. But it’s ok, they were ‘careful’ this time, so it can’t have been their fault. *bang head against wall*
Four complete reformats and a new hard drive later, teenager finally realises that maybe he doesn’t need to download music quite as much as he thought and turns over a new leaf. Maybe me refusing to ever fix the PC again had something to do with it? :P
Imagine my surprise when said teenager who has been ‘clean’ for almost a year tells me over Gtalk that he has a problem. Family friends visiting his house had let the younger teens on the PC only to leave it infested with spyware. I could have cried as I have given this machine to my cousin for good behavior and I have loved and cherished it for the 18 months previous without a single problem - I am anal about internet security.
On my quest to rid the current spyware I decide to have a scout around the net as I really didn’t want to reformat this machine as I do not have any reboot disk for it and no fresh copy of XP to put on.
I came across the Geeks to go forum. The level of help and assistance given on here is amazing. I read a thread where a moderator had guided another member, step by step, through almost rebuilding windows from scratch after a nasty infection. This is what web communities are all about in my eyes.
There is a very useful sticky on their forums to get you started on cleaning your machine up.
jan said,
November 19, 2006 @ 9:03 am
Tell me about it, with 2 teenagers in the house ,internet security becomes scary, Luckily Matthew ( 18 )is very sensible and knows his way round a PC without a problem, he understands all about secrurity after having to format their PC about 6 times due to infected music files being downloaded.
So they share a PC and he is administrator of the machine and does stop my daughter from downloading music files if she gets round his barriers it results in her being banned from the PC for 2 weeks at a time. Chris is right when it comes to internet security you really do have to be on your toes and forums such as that one can prove to be invaluable when you do have problems.