We’ve been dealing with a larger amount of spyware and malware than usual at my current place of employment. Often times these applications will deploy themselves even when Symantec Antivirus is updated and in place. We do the usual “scrub and pray” hoping for a no rebuild. Due to the increased amount of infections, we started checking in to what and where users were browsing.

I started using a program called IEHistoryView which I downloaded over here http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/iehv.html. This application is amazingly simple and very powerful. If you have the correct administrative keys you can view the browsing history of just about anyone in your office.

With this tool we noticed a very interesting trend. It seems that the vast majority of infected users are browsing for “free TV”. Tossing this in to Google pulls up sites like www.free-tv-video-online.info. Sites like this contain infected banners and ads that are taking users to fake security sites that are infecting their computers with malware and spyware.

Almost every user that has been infected has been using Internet Explorer 7 or higher. These browsers don’t carry plugins like adblock that prevent these malicious banners from wreaking havoc. This add-on is available for Chrome and Firefox.

If it’s too late and you have programs constantly bugging you, telling you to pay money to remove a whole mess of viruses and trojans, do yourself a favor and head over to http://www.microsoft.com/security_essentials/ or Avast (which is free if you’re a home user, they try to make that a hard fact to find.) Finally, because you’re going to need it, also head over to http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/ and http://www.malwarebytes.org/ because they’ll also help with the cleaning.

Final word of note, if you have a very basic knowledge of computers, you will most likely be shit out of luck. Take this time to back up any documents and information you want to save and just reformat. The next time the Internet tells you about this amazing free service which is too good to be true, it most likely is.

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