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03/25/2003 Archived Entry: "EXTREMELY ANNOYING SPYWARE ALERT!!"

Jen recently was having a situation where when she did a search on Google another not-quite-a-frame appeared on the left giving "Enhanced Search Results" that were really Google-stylized advertising.

It looked kind of like:

+-------+----------------+
| NEW   | Search Results |
+-------+----------------+
|       | Results 1-5    |
+-------+----------------+
1. xxxxxxxx
2. xxxxxxxx
3. xxxxxxxx
4. xxxxxxxx
5. xxxxxxxx

After a bit of research and emailing Google, I found out this is some [spy|mal]ware from an unknown source. Jen had recently installed something that also installed this (the only software she remembers being Winamp, though no guarantees that's it).

If this is happening to you...close your browser, get to a command prompt, go to c:\windows\system, and delete sbsrch*.dll. Reboot.

Late edit: Uh...forgot to say this affected Windows (multiple versions) and -at least- IE 6.0

Replies: 2 comments

Excellent! The file were in system32 though but wasnt that hard to figure out! :) One more thing with this. Every time i opened IE for the first time after reboot a banner poped up. This is gone now too. Seemed to have something with the search "spyware" to do. Posted by gein @ 05/27/2003 07:14 AM PST