I don’t know if you are like me, but I am almost constantly fighting popup ads. What you may or may not know is that most of these popup ads are generated by components installed on your computer called “spyware”.
I deal with spyware a lot with customers at work. We have a product that is supposed to block popups. It does a pretty good job with JavaScript popups, but it can’t usually block spyware. We usually recommend the following sites/downloads to customers with spyware.
and.doxdesk.com: parasite — Doxdesk has some great information about known spyware parasites: what they do, where they come from, and how to remove them. It even has a quick and dirty JavaScript that will attempt to detect spyware on your computer. I’m looking at the site right now and it says I have something called “IPInsight” installed. It also gives you a direct link to information about removing whatever you may be infected with.
Lavasoft Ad-Aware — The free version of this software will scan for and help you remove spyware components from your computer. They also have a Professional version (for a cost) that stays on all the time and detects as spyware viruses are installed on your computer. I run the free version (never felt like buying it, but it would be nice) program about once a month—whenever I notice stray popups—and I usually find 20 or 30 new components each time I run it.
If any of you have never used either of these resources, I encourage you to do so. Let me know what you find.
I actually downloaded a new (well, new to me) spyware killer this week, and I like it better than Ad-Aware.
Spybot – Search & Destroy — This freeware program can take out over 8000 different spyware/adware components, plus you can set it up to automatically scan at certain times daily or weekly. You can even set it up to auto-detect new spyware components as they come into your computer. The interface isn’t as flashy as Ad-aware, but it has a much bigger feature set, making it (IMO) a much better product.
In adition I’d like to recommend few more resources to fight against spyware:
http://www.kephyr.com – provides free spyware detection tool called bazooka. With its help you can remove parasites manually.
http://www.2-spyware.com – provides manual and automatic removal of spyware, adware, worms, dialers, hijackers and other parasites.
I would normally not approve that last comment, since it is on a really old post and looks like advertising, but in this case it’s at least relevant advertising, so it seems to have been posted by a real human and not a robot. I don’t have as much of a problem with that. I hope the tools the last guy suggested will be of some help to someone.