Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware ROCKS!

The other day I came across an unbelievable tool that I need to tell you all about… Let me give you the two main reasons why I love this tool so much already:

1. It’s free. :)

2. It works perfectly.

What tool am I talking about? It’s called Anti-Malware and it’s from the guys over at Malwarebytes. Let me tell you what happened though and what actually introduced me to this tool. I was on some website just two nights ago, reading an article (actually it was another blog)… nothing out of the ordinary… I was on the site for a good 10-15 seconds when all of a sudden I get a window popping up (not a browser pop-up, more like a 3rd party application) asking me to accept the license agreement for an “antivirus program”…I think the name of the (bogus) program was ‘Vista AntiVirus 2008′. It had an option to cancel, but not knowing what I was up against I simply hit CTRL-ALT-DEL to bring up Task Manager. When I did this I could tell that my background bitmap was already changed! It looked something like this (though not exactly, what i had was a variant apparently):




CRAP!! I knew I had been taken for some spyware (probably an unpatched Firefox vulnerability - shame on me for not having the patch installed). At any rate I did notice some strange looking files in the process list….which I promptly killed. Also found those files referenced in my registry….took those out. But as anyone who has dealt with nasty spyware can attest, rebooting my PC over and over again just seemed to bring the malware back….

Even worse, all my HTTP requests via a browser–be it Firefox or Internet Explorer–were being intercepted an sent off to some el-cheapo search engine loaded with sponsored result links…. grrr…. But for some reason, the malware was letting me bring up Google.com. So I was able to do a google search, I just couldn’t click on any of the links without that request being intercepted…. So instead of clicking on the actual links in the search results, I instead clicked on the Google cache of that link…. this enabled me to hit these sites and read up on what exactly I contracted….

Long story short, I found a thread right here that really helped me out…I read about the experience of someone who had apparently been hit with the same exact crap…and he’s the one who recommended the Malwarebytes tool. So sometimes even crappy trying experiences can lead to good things…