Getting rid of the malware called IE - TOTALLY! (XP/SP3/IE7)
Wednesday, September 17, 2008 at 9:55 pm
Windows XP Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by Monde
(2 messages posted)
There's another thread that addresses, in a somewhat vague way, the removal of Internet
Explorer - but it does not satisfy me because I do not want to merely shut off user
access to it. That will not stop the recent spate of very EVIL (and unfortunately
well written) malware from going right ahead, shunting the permissions to whatever
it wishes, and using it anyway. Now that web designers tend to design for "everything
BUT IE" as a rule rather than exception I can finally get rid of the damned thing
without any regrets. I note that after installing SP3 it seemed to be even more
unwilling to let me do this, and I didn't want to louse everything up from here til
the next 498 Sundays.
Unfortunately I caught the world's most horrendous malware - Smitfraud! You get this
and/or Virtumonde, there's no other choice but to do a wipe/format/clean install,
so I did.
(Note to fellow Smitfraud/Virtumonde sufferers: you've got my sympathies straight
to the heart. It's the only choice, to start from square one and go through all
the BS of reinstalling the whole system, softwares, ad.infinitum - unless you want
to end up with a system riddled with holes and so full of dead tentacles of the thing
after whatever tweaky slaughter method you go with--and worst of all, it's not just
clutter...some of those tentacles will respawn new horrors, just like those movie
monsters that reanimate and regrow themselves from hacked-off bits of their dead
bodies. I could describe what I would like to do to the individual[s] who wrote
these malwares, but as this would by necessity be far too crude for a forum not devoted
to unpleasantries and violent outbursts, I'll spare you.)
Sorry for the digression - but now that I've reformatted, and reinstalled, and finally
got with the program and stopped being a lazy twit and now do everything from a NON-ADMIN
ACCOUNT (I know! I should have been doing that from the get-go, what can I say, I'm
a slow learner...) I want to continue with my proactive security prophylaxis schema
(in English, that means "ounce of prevention = a ton of cures") and get rid of the
piece of malware called INTERNET EXPLORER in a way that is as close as one can get
to actually removing the $#@! thing instead of pretending to. Also I'd like any
other suggestions of Windows programs to remove - is Media Player full of holes enough
that I ought to hose it off as well? ALL other players work better than it does and
I am really paranoid about the zillion ways it wants to shunt info to and from my
computer to "Macrohard" (and gods know what other places - whether or not "Macrohard"
intended that this was to happen!) so if there's a way to hose this too, I'd like
to hear about it.
Thanks in advance,
M.
Dominate the subversive paradigm! ~ 
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