Help, spyware infection

[A_NAKED_PENGUIN]

Ok, I got some spyware that I'm having a heck of a time getting rid of. It's one of those things that are in the system tray and keep telling me I have spyware and to click the balloon and buy the product, its called Spy Falcon, I can't find where to get rid of this, and Spybot wont pick it up. theres also another icon that says i have a system alert for spyware and adware, and the damn balloon keeps coming up. Please help, I can't find ANY of the folders or anything.

 

[dmroeder]

Have you tried typing "Spy Falcon" in google yet.

 

[HalfHuman]

use "autoruns" from sysinternals and see what is starting with the system and manually kill it. see what dlls and components uses using process xp and cripple it. i love hunting for those pests. u could also try webroot spy... something. i heard it's very good. maybe spybot s&d will release an update for the crap u are exeprimenting right now but if u know what u are doing u can kill it by hand.

 

[INeedCache]

Could you perhaps use system restore to go back to before this happened? If not, I think Pest Patrol and Spyware Doctor are two of the best antispyware programs. Clean from safe mode.

 

[llama_man]

I had a similar problem recently. After a year infection-free, I got some cr*p I couldn't shift. Norton and my two firewalls didn't even detect it, and although Housecall detected a lot of stuff (thus causing me to swear at Norton a lot) clearing it up didn't help the problem. Tried manually fixing too, but to no avail.

In the end I cut my losses - backed-up my save games and reinstalled Windows. It's not a bad idea to do this once a year or so anyway - I certainly noticed my boot time being ~20% faster so I guess my registry was a bit messy.

 

[TheCh0s3n1]

Try my Guide to Fighting Adware and Spyware. Read through it to see if there are some things you have not tried, like going into Safe Mode to run scans or temporarily disabling your Internet connection.

If you do a Google search, you will also find methods to remove SpyFalcon specifically, but I personally have not tried them, so at this point I will not recommend any of them except for what I have included in the Guide. That is not to say that any of the removal methods available through Google's search results will not actually work. It's just that I cannot guarantee they will - you'd just have to go by the word of those on the sites you Googled.

If you decide to repartition, reformat, and then reinstall the OS, then you have a Golden Opportunity to secure that machine really tight. You will find some other guides that will help you do just that on the NSA's website. It's not light- or easy-reading for average users, but it's certainly quite effective.