Tonight, my mission, as I have chosen to accept it, is to
rid my computer of malware and spyware.
Now, for those of you naively assuming all is well on your computer,
join me in the land of paranoia and angst.
Is it really all ok?
For a while, I have noticed that when I load Chrome, my
normal homepage was missing, replaced with a search engine,
MySearchDial.com. Never heard of it
either, eh? I Googled it to see what it
was and was stunned to discover it was Spyware.
Of all the indecent things to discover!
How the hell had that gotten there?
I have no idea how and am still wondering. It turns out to be completely harmless. Yet, I don’t want it there. Why is it there? How can I get rid of it?
I browsed my way through forum and help webpage over and
over again; like all good things in the world that you might not be familiar
with, you can find a Youtube video to assist you in getting rid of the
blighter. Yet, even after several hours
of jumping back and forth from safe mode and haphazardly deleting parts of my
registry, I was no nearer to having my beloved Google Chrome homepage back.
It has been my evenings obsession. I had run various virus searches, over and
over again. Nothing. I uninstalled, reinstalled, deleted
bookmarks, backed them up, added them, removed them. Nothing.
And after all of this, I managed to find a wonderful website http://malwaretips.com/blogs/start-mysearchdial-removal/
that allowed me to completely remove the little shitbag from my computer
forever. I’ve added the little gem to my
bookmarks, just in case this ever happens again.
I share this with you lovely people because nowadays we keep
so much personal and private information on our computers, we should be very
careful about what we do (and don’t) allow past our firewalls and to worm its
way into our browsers.
Its more than that though.
For me personally, I’m a control freak and like my computer and my phone
a very specific way. If I change
something, it’s because I want it like that.
Some naughty piece of software changing my digital landscape without
permission is not what I asked for. There
have been countless changes to Facebook over the years that have proven how resistant
to change I can be. Sometimes, when
things change, it turns out to be better than it was before (the new iphone iOS
for example). Other times, not so much.
In this instance, I’m more than happy to announce the return to how I
want my browser to be.
As I type this, my new friend, 'Malware Bytes' (http://www.malwarebytes.org/products/malwarebytes_free/)
is working its way through my computer and finding me new things to worry
about. That’s part of the bigger problem
for a lot of us I think. There is so
much in this world for us to worry
about. The things we worry about the most are things like
spyware, malware, identity theft and on the list goes. The truth is that we have no idea how any of
this stuff works; that’s why we’re afraid for our digital selves. The real truth, as I see it? There is very little difference now to how
things were thirty years ago; you feel perfectly safe in your home until you’re
away on holiday and your house is broken into.
The violation is no different. It’s
a strange thing to discover how much stock you really put into your digital
reality, until some irritating search engine just won’t go away. Suddenly, my paranoid digital eye is roaming
far and wide.
I currently have 17
pieces of malware, and rising.
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| Image borrowed from http://main.makeuseoflimited.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/computer-virus.jpg |
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