Beware of the Spy Sheriff

For those people out there in cyberspace...we all know how many viruses...trojans...worms and spyware are out there. Well...3 days ago I had a run-in with the Spy Sheriff. This was a devious little adware program that masqueraded as an Adware/Spyware removal program. How did I get it you might wonder? All I did was click on a website from a google search for truck shells and...KAZAAM...it was there. Next thing I know...I get the blue screen of death...and a huge banner in the middle saying I had a malware infection and I needed to download the Spy Sheriff to get rid of it. It froze up everything and I could not close it. It highjacked my web browser and disabled my active desktop.

Just how evil was this thing? To my chagrin...it attacked my McAfee Security Center...and deactivated the virus scan program...the firewall and the anti-spam/spyware program. After 2 days of computer hell...I was finally able to remove the Spy Sheriff (by the way, it wanted 29 bucks to buy the program to remove the virus it introduced in the first place). Then I discovered a resident virus in the memory which I was able to isolate and remove. I am still having problems getting the computer to work right...but it is getting better...ever so slowly.

I just shudder thinking about having to wipe the drive clean and reinstall XP. All the settings and plenty of programs would be wiped out. Oh sure...I burned backups of the working files and some programs on DVD...but it is such a pain to have to get it all like it was before. Only as a very last resort! I will keep plugging away at it...like I always do. Just a word of warning....
beware of the Spy Sheriff!