Removing Spyquake.com Spyware?

[MERCYME]

How do I remove the spyquake.com spyware?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[johnfoss]

Have you tried a Google search?

http://tinyurl.com/lgfra

[ice_cold_uni6]

omg! the same thing happened to me! just find the free version of lavasoft ad-aware anti-software and download it. to use spywarequake you must pay.

[john_childs]

I'm curious. Do you know how you got infected?

[Unimichael]

I had that crap too. But if you can't get rid of it using ad-aware in "normal" mode, start the 'puter in SAFE mode then start ad/aware. I had no luck in normal mode... but safe mode cleared it out!

[MERCYME]

Trying to download a crack, I got spyquake off though.
So its all good.
I never scanned my files that I just download, for now on I am going to scan everything.
Spyquake is a tough one.

[john_childs]

Trying to download a crack, I got spyquake off though.
So its all good.
I never scanned my files that I just download, for now on I am going to scan everything.
Spyquake is a tough one.
That's a common way to get malware. The warez sites and the people who make the cracks are not exactly ethical to begin with. Need to be very careful trolling those waters. Be especially careful because Windows rootkits are getting better and getting more popular. You won't see a rootkit or be able to scan for a rootkit after it has been installed. They're nasty. Your machine is owned. It's not safe to do banking or anything else private on that machine after a rootkit.

One option is to run another instance of Windows in a virtual machine. Play with cracks and warez in the virtual machine. If the virtual machine gets owned or hosed it is easy to fix either by using the snapshot features in the VM or by restoring a backup of the VM environment.

Microsoft just made their Virtual PC (http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtualpc/default.mspx) program free. It's a good VM for virtualizing Windows.

VMware also has some free options. There is VMware Player (http://www.vmware.com/products/player/) and VMware Server (http://www.vmware.com/products/server/). VMware Player is limited in that it cannot create a VM environment on its own, but you can use EasyVMX (http://www.easyvmx.com/) to create the VM environment then install Windows (or Linux) in the VM.

If you just want to virtualize Windows I'd go with Virtual PC. It's more straightforward.

The problem is that in order to legally create a second instance of Windows in a VM you need a second license for Windows. Microsoft's license doesn't allow you to have the same copy of Windows running as both the host OS and the virtual OS at the same time.

VMs are cool. I have a virtual Linux that I play with. It's easy to play with and doesn't require dual booting. It does, however, require more RAM because you've got two OSs running at the same time.