We receive many calls from people suffering from the ill effects of adware and spyware. You know the general signs of adware and spyware – popups flooding your desktop whether browsing the web or not, noticeable degradation in the performance of your machine, frequent crashes, etc. Most people have anti-virus software installed to protect against various forms of computer virii, but many types of spyware and adware fly under the radar of these tools.
There are two tools (free for personal use) that we install, run, and teach people to use for detecting and cleaning up spyware/adware on their machines. These tools are Ad-Aware and Spybot, and the combination of the two are the best attack we have found against adware/spyware that has already penetrated a system.
Our general method is to:
- Install Spybot along with the latest updates for it, run through its initial configuration routine, and then run a scan with it. If any problems are detected, we look through the list and clean up those items that need to be cleaned. For a Spybot scan, normally all the items detected need to be cleaned unless the person wants to keep a particular piece of software that requires adware/spyware in order to run. (With all of the freeware alternatives out there, we try to suggest other tools that may meet the person’s needs without infesting their system with adware/spyware.)
- Install Ad-Aware along with its latest updates and perform a full system scan with it. This detects different levels of potential problems on the system, and once again we have to go through the list of detected problems and clean up only those items that need to be cleaned.
- Use the immunization feature of Spybot to limit the ability of certain known spyware/adware to install itself on the system.
We recommend running these scans once a week and after installing new pieces of software. Before running a scan, the tools should first be updated, and both Spybot and Ad-Aware provide easy ways to do this through the tools themselves.
Of course, the best defense against spyware/adware is to never install it in the first place, so we chat about being a cautious Internet user while teaching about the tools being used to clean up the system. Unfortunately, experience is the best weapon here, and it just takes time to gain that experience.
Update: The preceding is by no means a complete list of steps, and we have received some questions about other steps from people. In order to better support those attempting to remove adware/spyware on their own, we will expand a bit more.
We tend to perform steps 1-3 without booting into Safe mode the first time. Once the steps are completed and if we feel it necessary, we then reboot the system and start up in Safe mode. From there, we repeat steps 1-3.
Additionally, the removal process is not always as successful as the detection process. If any adware/spyware remains after the clean up, we normally perform a search online, locate trustworthy instructions for manual removal, and then remove it manually.
Also, while Ad-Aware identifies interesting files in web browsers’ caches and such, we tend to manually clean out unnecessary, miscellaneous files, such as temporary files, web browser cache files, etc, and, possibly, disable system restore.