Yesterday I inadvertantly d/l a Trojan called Spyware Strike

I had an analagous experience Thursday night/Friday morning.

Peacefully browsing, my AVG went off, said virus alert, Internet Explorer shut down and wouldn't re-open until after re-boot, and then it defaulted to a bogus home page that helpfully offered me links to suppliers of virus and spyware removal tools. No doubt if I had followed those links I would have been in even worse trouble.

I ran AVG full scan, it found no viruses, but all on its own would pop up with a virus alert about the same file in Windows/Temp that no matter how many times I deleted it still came back.

I ran AdAware and SpyBot, and they very helpfully told me that I had tracking cookies which I don't care about (if someone wants to see a list of the porn sites I visit, they're welcome to it! ) but did nothing useful.

PC Magazine's website recommended very highly a program called Spyware Doctor. I spent $30 to buy it, and as near as I can tell it was money very well spent. Spyware Doctor found 51 "bad things" (this was after AdAware, Spybot, and AVG) including a list of about a dozen Trojans, a bogus toolbar to give access to the above-mentioned bogus website, and some new desktop icons to do the same. Spyware Doctor got rid of all of them, and after I set my IE home page back to Google, everything seems to be back to normal. I have noticed no anomalous behavior, and I am watching closely.

At Tony Fabris' suggestion, I downloaded and installed FireFox to run instead of IE (security is supposed to be a lot better) and so far I am quite impressed: FireFox seems to be designed by people who understand and love their product, as opposed to IE which seems to have come about by "...oh, by the way Mr Gates, we better stick something into Windows so people can see the internet."

tanstaafl.