Yesterday I had to repair a computer where there were some icons in the desktop which could not be deleted. Anything you did was useless, you could not righ-click on them or select and delete with the keyboard, so I knew that was malware trying to avoid being removed.
In a first try I installed Ad-Aware and SpyDefense, the usual anti-spyware software I use for cleaning most systems. But it seems this spyware was particularly malign and avoided deinstallation by rewriting itself to disk on reboot.
So I had to investigate a bit further and discovered that some people had some luck with OmegaKillerSM, a software specially designed to remove this kind of spyware. I downloaded it and followed the instructions in the page.
Luckily, the icons finally disappeared and have not been seen anymore. This programs does more than removing icons, it also removes browser hijacks (when your browser points to pages you don’t want to go or replaces search sites like Google for other which give you bogus results) and can remove some toolbars which get installed in Internet Explorer.
It also modifies the hosts file (don’t worry if you don’t understand this) so you can’t navigate to any of the domains which install this spyware, so you will be more protected in the future.
To get more protection, it’s best not to use Internet Explorer when browsing but use a more secure alternative like Firefox or Opera, and always keep them updated so they don’t have any security bugs.
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