General Chat

the following is a warning for Purityscan software. I think the list has come out a bit clearer.......... you may not realise what is being deleted when you run a "cleaning program"

Iwar Aaar, Aasd, Acao, Aerr, Amra, Channelup, Ctcr, Deam, Earu, Eber, Enns, Euea, Holu, Iaas, Oato Oecm Oeet, Ohdd, Oocs, Opac, Oses, Resw, Saea, Saus Sibc, Sodd, Tdrp, Tesc, Ttuh, Whra, Wted Aatn, Aida, Auta, Bnop, Bssa, Bssn, Cspa, Dsds, Hela, Hurd, Laoc, Lour, Moun, Mtst, Muue, Noha, Notn, Oewe, Osus, Rcsh, Reoe, Rper, Smuc, Sltr, Upao, Uate, Woss Iwar.exe Aaar.exe, Aasd.exe, Acao.exe, Aerr.exe, Amra.exe, ChannelUp.exe, Ctcr.exe, Deam.exe, Earu.exe, Eber.exe, Enns.exe, Euea.exe, Holu.exe, Iaas.exe, Oato.exe, Oecm.exe, Oeet.exe, Ohdd.exe, Oocs.exe, Opac.exe, Oses.exe, Resw.exe, Saea.exe, Saus.exe, Sibc.exe, Sodd.exe, Tdrp.exe, Tesc.exe, Ttuh.exe, Whra.exe, Wted.exe Task which is dropped onto your PC when you run the free “hidden pornography” scanner from PuritySCAN.com. At the time of writing, 9‑May‑2004, PuritySCAN.com purports to scan your PC for hidden pornography and help you remove it. For a start, at the time of writing, 9‑May‑2004, the scan for pornographic content is a total scam and downright dangerous. The scan will reports files like ASSETS.GIF and ASSETS.EXE as files containing pornographic material because, wait for it, because ..... the names of the files contain the word “ass”. Shocking, shocking, shocking. If we had gone ahead and “cleaned” our test hard drive of the reported files, we would have lost “ASSETS.GIF” which is a graphic file that is part of Microsoft Office 2000, and we would have lost “ASSETS.EXE” which is asset management software !! And it gets worse : STRIPED.GIF will also have been deleted because the filename has the letters “strip”, and, unbelievably, SUNBANNA.GIF will have been deleted because the filename contains the letters .......... “Anna” ! There are no words to describe a scam like this one. It gets worse still : what this software also does do is drop this file together with a second one onto your PC (The Ultimate Troubleshooter will also highlight the second file), sets both up as startup entries, and the PC then gets inundated with popup advertisements and also experiences serious Internet browsing performance issues. As much as it irritates us to be, to be fair there is a license agreement which states, amongst other things, that you agree to receive advertising : “By installing PurityScan you understand and agree that PurityScan will make the following changes to your Internet Browser: Several PROMOTIONAL CONSOLES (daughter console/interstitial) may be launched for the duration of time you spend online. These consoles may continue to be launched as long as you have PurityScan installed on your machine. PurityScan does not monitor the activities or collect information from users once they have left PurityScan. By downloading PurityScan, you understand that these changes cannot be reversed without running the removal executable of PurityScan. If you try to change the items above manually, your changes will be lost when you reboot or turn off your computer.”. This is nightmarish adware posing as a free service to the Internet community – the publishers know full well that 90% of users never read License Agreements and that they will therefore get conned into running a not only useless but dangerous scan, and they will also get infected with adware (advertising software) ! Since its introduction in 2002 this task not only constantly changes name, to evade detection, but it has also appeared in the Task List of users who have never accessed PuritySCAN.com, so we suspect that ClickSpring have an Affiliates programme which allows unscrupulous websites to co‑brand the PuritySCAN program so they can lure users into running scans of their PCs while at the same time dropping onto those PCs this task which will continually pull up popup advertisements about their products ! Through investigation and talking to infected users, we even have strong circumstantial evidence that this task is obtained, of all places, on pornographic websites which provide a free “tool to erase all traces of the user’s visit to those sites” !! Finally, we have also noticed that all users who had this task and who did not have adequate antivirus protection, were all infected with the Badtrans virus – we are not yet sure of the reason for this strange coincidence. Recommendation : Get rid of this task immediately. Read the following carefully to do so. 1) Terminate IWAR (or its equivalent) on the Tasks tab of The Ultimate Troubleshooter. 2) Terminate the second task which The Ultimate Troubleshooter will have also identified as being ClickSpring software. 3) Switch to the Startups tab, highlight the startup entry which has IWAR.EXE, right-click on it and choose the “Delete from the hard disk the file that this startup points to” menu option. Delete the file. 4) Repeat this file deletion process for all other tasks identified on the Startups tab as being ClickSpring software (do not assume there will only be two ClickSpring startup entries – there are sometimes many more). 5) Search your hard disk for a file called PURITYSCAN.EXE. If you find it, delete it. 6) Delete all ClickSpring entries from the Startups tab of The Ultimate Troubleshooter. 7) Finally, make sure you have a reputable antivirus product, manually update it fully, then reboot your PC into Safe Mode and run a full virus scan of your PC. 8) Reboot into Normal Mode and empty your Recycle Bin.

thanks Bob Elaine X :o))

This seems to be the latest way of propogating adware and viruses - Offer a free utility which seems to do something useful and include the nasties in the small print. Best advice - Never run any program unless you are 100%sure that it is OK. You can always do a quick check by Googling the name. That will often bring up comments from unhappy victims, though this is not infallable. Next best - In Windows XP you can create a "restore point" so that if the program is a problem you can restore the previous settings.

If you feel the need to look at the original listing for the above, (and others), the site is" Answers that work" The homepage for the above site......... http://www.answersthatwork(.)com/Tasklist_pages/tasklist.htm