Posted by Larry Hoover on January 3, 2005, at 11:59:32
In reply to Re: MALWARE! » Larry Hoover, posted by Toph on January 3, 2005, at 8:44:09
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> > When I get geeky, I know that evil exists. One manifestation is Kazaa, the music download site. My kids' computer gets so full of malware that it actually bogs down to nothing. It won't even load the desktop, sometimes. I can't tell you how many times I've taken Gain.gator off of it, and how many corrupted files I find. Hundreds. I'm going to have to put Netnanny or something on that machine, before it dies from the malware burden.
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> Larry, when I run my SpyBot software on the bottom I can read the files that it is scanning for bad stuff. I see gain.Gator files, but it skips right over them. If Gator is adware or malware or spyware or badware or something evil, why doesn't SpyBot or Adaware remove it? Should I do a search for all Gator files and remove them myself? Thanks,
> -TophYou can manually remove them, but it is not recommended. Screw up your registry, and your computer won't run.
http://www.iamnotageek.com/printer-180.html
Gain.gator is an ad program that facilitates pop-ups. I've heard that there is a version of this software that is modified to store your passwords in remote-accessible cookie files, but the real issue is that gator is an executable, and you don't want foreign executables running on your box.
I have no idea why Spybot is not detecting/removing gain.gator. As verne has mentioned, there is a new (updates to December 2004) version of Spybot out. The old version is no longer updated (as of March?), and it will miss gain.gator, I think. I highly recommend upgrading, as this version takes a system restore point before it makes any changes. You don't need to uninstall the old version to install the new.
Also, get lavasoft's Ad-aware. It's free, and it will most certainly remove gain.gator and all the associated files and folders.
Ad-aware:
http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/Spybot build 1.3:
http://www.safer-networking.org/en/mirrors/index.htmlLar
poster:Larry Hoover
thread:433996
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20041226/msgs/437199.html