Beware: guitarnotes.com-spyware attack

[EricV]

I am not sure whether this belongs here, but since I spent a whole night in front of my computer reinstalling everything, I figured I should warn you guys.
Last night, I had a student over, and I wanted to look for something, so I went to www.guitarnotes.com (http://www.guitarnotes.com)
It´s kind of a search engine for TABs and Links and stuff, and it´s been around for years.
Anyway, even though I have pretty good security measures ( software firewall, SP2, PopUp-Blocker, antivirus software etc. ), somehow this spyware installed itself in the background.
From then on, it was popup-hell, and that thing dropped items on my desktop, as well. Mind you, this has NEVER happened before, and I am on the web a lot sometimes.
I ran pretty much every spyware-program available, I used CWShredder ( to kill the redirects in my browser )... all to no avail. I did a websearch, and apparently, this was a really bad one.
So I decided to reinstall everything, and since I had a problem with my backup-image-disk, I lost A LOT of stuff ( and I MEAN a lot ).

I don´t wanna badmouth that site, but for now, I recommend to stay away from it without any REALLY REALLY good protection
HJust thought I´d share
Eric

[Amadeus]

Wow, that sucks, I've gotten some pretty wicked spyware in the past and it's no fun. Do you use Mozilla Firefox? I havent had any trouble since I started using it. Anyway, Thanks for the warning.

[Len H]

I also use Firefox as my web browser, and the amount of junk coming into my computer has dropped to almost nothing. Eric, also it sounds like you may have gotten hit by addware, which is slightly different and seems to be more common than spyware. I have had good luck (knock on wood) using Ad-Aware SE to remove this crap. Thanks for the heads up.

[oRg]

This happens alot to people. Here's a list of the software I use.

Windows XP Home Edition
Zone Alarm Pro Security Suite
AVG Anti-virus 7.0 Free
Lavasoft Ad-aware
Hijack This!
CWShredder

and I used to use Microsoft Internet Explorer but this has ALOT of problems with its security and is not a good browser at all IMO. I use Mozilla Firefox 1.0 and for the most par thtis blocks all pop-ups, and there's options for customizing the restrictions of the java programs that run on your computer. Chances are what you got Eric was spyware that was installed from either ActiveX or Java programs. Firefox doesn't use ActiveX (which is good, too many virus' out there written in ActiveX), and Java is mainly used for email programs (suc has Hotmail, Gmail and such), so this you can disable and re-enable whenever you like. But for surfing the internet I usually have it disabled. Java programs have also been known to install things to your computer without your permission. This way the only thing your getting from the site is cookies and temporary internet files. This you can even set to the smallest possible space (I have all my cookies and temporary internet files sent to a small thumb drive, this way they're not sitting on my computer).

Also there is a way to retrieve all the stuff you lost (most of the time you can get it back, but then there are certain occations that it can't) but it's too long to explain through a post...lol. For example, I ended up deleting all of my archives (which contained lecture notes, homework, various guitar articles, among other things like CD backups and such) and I was able to retrieve almost all of it. Except for 1 Buckethead CD that I no longer have in my physical CD collection.

[EricV]

Org,
thanks a bunch for the advice. I believe that adware was installed via Java, as far as I can tell now. I guess I should indeed switch to Firefox then, huh ?
I am not too mad about most of the stuff gone. Fortunately, I did a lot of backup-ing, and the stuff I did lose can be replaced eventually.
Thanks
Eric

[EricV]

By the way, any reports on the Thunderbird email client they´re also offering ?
As compared to, say Eudora or Outlook...
Thanks
Eric

[gersdal]

The Thunderbird email client fits my needs at least as good as Outlook, and less virus sensitive (most viruses are obviously made for the Microsoft produts). Haven't used the Eudora the last years, but used to be ok.
G