Cardomain Spyware/Adware warning

Just FYI - about 2pm this afternoon, I surfed by someone's Cardomain site. As I clicked on this person's second page, one of the popup ads that accompany Ccardomain opened up past my popup blocker, and attempted to download a whole slew of nasty software to my computer (ex. MyPCSearch, SskUpdater, NDrv, STC, SurfSideKick 2, SecondThought, PeopleOnPage, TopMoxie, ClickSpring, CoolWebSearch, and a number of others). I don't recall what the ad was, because I right-clicked and closed it without looking (as I often do when things get past Google's popup blocker). The next thing I knew, my registry protection program was popping up window after window of attempted registry changes. I'm still manually cleaning out some of the nastier stuff that got past my protection programs.

I've altered my homepage links to something other than my personal Cardomain page, and I won't be visiting any of their sites again. I'm also posting this as a warning to the rest of the online community.

Thanks for the heads up!!

I got hit with the same thing Thursday night. I had clicked on a link on someones page and I thought that it was from a site his page was linking to. I guess not. :oops:

"registry protection program"?

Can you expand and contrast what program you use for that?
Have you tried more than one type?

When I become King there will be some hackers that do Police station guard duty in Iraq. That will keep them away from computers.

It's called TeaTimer, and it's bundled with Spybot Search and Destroy, an anti-spyware freeware program. Basically, with TeaTimer running, any time any program attempts to alter a value in your computer's registry, a window pops up, prompting you with what the program is, what the value being changed, added, or deleted from the registry is, and giving you the option to accept or deny the change.

This works with legitimate programs as well as spyware - for example, we recently bought a new printer/scanner/copier combo for our home network, and TeaTimer popped up multiple times during the software installation on my system, prompting me to specifically allow any registry changes the new software was trying to make. It also popped up dozens of times during this attack, allowing me to keep the registry from being altered (stopping the nasty crap from reinstalling itself every time the system is rebooted) while I cleaned the crap off of my system.

I'm glad today that I had it installed, although after today's attack and subsequent cleaning I've decided to finally take the multiple suggestions I've gotten and start using Firefox as my browser.

TeaTimer....I had not heard about that one.

Not sure how having FireFox would have made any difference in this case but I think I see your point. Any link could have a surprise behind it. IE has issues for a number of reasons but it is also the most used so that is why people design stuff to penetrate it.

Sad but funny. We have free browser programs but it cost $200. worth of equipment and software to safely use it.

Shame on them! And thanks for the heads up. Sheesh, is it so hard to make money on the Internet that people have to resort to pushing malware on people? :evil:

S.