I try to be sooo careful when it comes to surfing the Internet, opening email, and the like, but it looks like I wasn’t good enough this time. I just got hit by some kind of trojans/spyware while visiting a site. I’m not sure which one. I’ve been tracking the referrals for the post I did the other day on Running the Tablet PC OS on an iMac so I’ve been visiting lots of sites. I’m not sure if I hit something there or while following some spam links that Layne and I have been finding which copy our blog content and replace links to spam. What is complicating the issue is that I’ve been doing some double tricky IE development so I didn’t notice unusual behaviour—because I was in the middle of causing my own crashes.
I am sure of one thing: I was hit simply by visiting a site using IE 6. I wish I knew which one. I only had been using IE and the dev environment from the time I powered up this morning until the time I notcied I was infected. I have all the patches up to date. I have security set to a reasonable level. I did not accidentally download anything. Although, I was unfortunately running as administrator.
Now I have a mess. I can see a whole slew of trojans/spyware which I read online have been spreading around. Some people say the offenders can be removed easily, some say not. And, quite frankly, I’m unsure of trusting much of the information. There are so many people saying “Download this” or “Download that.” After awhile all these links begin to look like spam to me. Sorry folks, I know you’re working hard at providing info, but it’s too hard to tell what’s good advice and what’s not.
Right now, I’ve set the machine aside until I figure out whether it’s worth trying to repair or just wipe it out. My backups will have to do.
Update: Ugh. I see there was a patch that was to be released today! Oh my. I wonder if this would have fixed it. Please, everyone, make sure your patches are up to date.