What is the worst case of spyware you had and could you kill it?

Mine was on my old computer it was a dialer called "Hottest Shows on the Web" it dialed every hour and kicked us off our dial up which we had back then. I tried spybot, adaware which were the only ones i knew of back then and they could not kill it. Spybot found it but could not kill it even though it said it deleted it it dialed again when the hour came. We had to reformat the computer i learned of new anti spyware programs and did a full system scan with them and the new ones i had like ewido found and deleted the dialer. Im scared to go back and check to see if it really killed it. After that i have been coucious about what sites and things i see and download.

 

I had the "about:blank" browser homepage hijacker a couple of years ago, no antispyware could remove it at the time and I was still a 'beginner' in terms of malware so I ended up reinstalling windows.
Does anyone know if that hijacker is caused by a Trojan, or is it just spyware/adware?
Regards

 

Since I have my new computer : tracking cookies and MRU's.
I thought at least that the trial versions of NOD32 and KAV would find something, but nothing. I guess I'm too carefull.
I also have Ewido in trial, first scan = nothing. I'm a bore at Wilders.

 

Never on my home rigs..but some other peoples PCs..I've found some of the spyfalcon/spysheriff variants to be a bit more time consuming to clean.

 

About 2 years ago i visited a virus site and downloaded some of their goodies for research purposes only. One of them was named Hard Drive Killer.

I accidently initiated the .bat instance of it one late night and it wiped the entire drive of my test laptop in a matter of seconds.

Otherwise i encountered a weird and jumpy malware another time named bxx.exe or something along that name and it was a pest to chase down since it re-morphed itself and bounced from one system folder to another while dragging the PC down to a slow crawl, even in Safe Mode it was a chore to snag because it redevelop even more other files like some set up program and they took on similar behavior.

Fun times, not really but a great learning experience and contest of nerves and patience.

I held on to the installer for a time but AVG gobbled it up along with a myriad of others one day when it auto-run a scheduled scan on dual drives.

 

Funny, i really don't remember what it was, but i've only owned a comp for 4 yrs now and it definitely had a reason for comin here. Go figure.

HJT comes too mind for some reason.




snowbound

 

ive never had spyware on my computers (unless cookies count) but i do remember cleaning one computer infected with spysheriff or some variant thereof.

 

never had it on my comps. Hope I never do.

 

An occational tracking cookie via Internet explorer the rare times I bother to check for spyware.