Death is too good for Spyware Quake scum
So there I was, using my computer and minding my own business, happy as the proverbial clam, engrossed in an intellectually stimulating article posted on my favorite porn site (Hey, it could happen) when BAM! — my world became a living Hell ...
Bells and whistles shrieked, light bars and strobes flashed, somewhere a Defcon 4 death klaxon blared, thunder ominously boomed, and — worst of all — a song by Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians began to vomit forth from the radio (okay, so maybe this was coincidental). The cause? Spyware Quake Version 2.0.
Brothers and sisters, friends and neighbors, kith and kin, let me 'splain somethin' to you. This little malware IED (that's Improvised Explosive Device for those of you in Okeechobee County) was created by the Devil's own spawn and believe 'ol B2 when he tells you — God and Bill Gates help you if your rat-infested, bug-infested Windows machine ever becomes possessed by SQ2.
Here's the scam: Spyware Quake is a program that is transported by and works in conjunction with one or more Trojan programs that infect your machine, then displays an icon in the system tray. This icon will repeatedly blink (and never go away), and also causes a randomly-flashing message to appear, which says that your computer is infected with dangerous spyware parasites. It asks you to download (for a hefty fee, of course) and install a removal program, which actually is Spyware Quake, a contemptible, illegally-distributed spyware remover.
SQ2 changes the Internet Explorer default home page (you can't change it back), redirects to malicious Web sites, shows commercial ads, randomly connects itself to the internet, hides from the user, stays resident in the background, and automatically runs on every Windows startup. But wait, that's not the best part.
SQ2 is often bundled with some real bad-acting malware. For example, my little bundle of joy contained Trojan Win32, Trojan Downloader, DCOM.Trojan, Zlob.Downloader, Spy Sheriff, and a few others whose names I've forgotten. Here's another sweet curve SQ2 throws at you...all of the fancy anti-virus and anti-spyware programs you have to take care of these varmints? Hah! They get permanently shut down and tell you that there is no problem. SQ2 laughs at Pest Patrol, Norton, Spybot Search and Destroy, yadda, yadda, yadda.
So what do you do? Well, after 18 hours of fighting (and losing) a gut-wrenching, emotionally-draining battle to take back control of my machine, I searched the Web for salvation and stumbled onto the good folks at Bleeping Computer. They offer some free downloadable files specifically created to remove all of this junk, as well as easy-to-follow instructions. But pack a lunch because it's going to take a while.
I've battled a ton of malware over the years but SQ2 is as insidious as they come. And mind you, Bleeping Computer offers this service as a self-help guide — use at your own risk — that's how nasty this crap is. Although you can be infected by a random drive-by, do yourself a favor and exclude the following URLs from your browser: spywarequake.com, spywarequake.net and spywarequake.info.
As for the perpetrating scum who promote this filth, they should have their testicles crushed in a vice (nipples if they're female), their fingernails and toenails should be ripped out — slowly and one by one, and their eyeballs should be cauterized with a smoking-hot soldering gun.
Or perhaps be given a stern talking-to.