Uh oh, what have you been looking at sis? (Helping someone solve a spyware problem)

[Elizara]

I don't think Sis has been looking at porn, but..

Seems she has a bunch of spyware on her pc. It said something bout the removal program had to be run as admin to remove a bunch of crap.

I mean to point her at the spyware/virus removal thread on there (Without any "I told you so"s about running adblocker plus and noscript, she did that at my computer building brother about some other stuff, I don't believe in that kinda stuff) but is there any other remedy I can use to help her clean that off? Since it wants to be run as admin and I don't know the password?

Oh and with the warning that "you have to beat this into shape" I mean to tell her she should install Adblocker Plus and Noscript to prevent any new infections, tho don't know if I can convince her. I think also her Windows 7 disk has been lost somewhere; Sis has a extremely bad habit of losing her install disks.

[Niya]

If you don't have admin rights, you can't install/run any of the halfway good removal tools that i'd usually use (Spybot, Malwarebytes, Hitman Pro)...
Only thing I could think of would be to use a live system (DVD) to scan and/or remove the crap by hand.

[orinthia]

I've been using Kaspersky rescue cds with good success lately. It uses a linux distro with ntfs read/write capability installed, and can usually recognize and setup your wifi to get updates and use a web browser. It's pretty nice; cleaned a couple fucked computers with it already and rescue data.

Honestly, newbies will have a horrible time with noscript, so I wouldn't put it on their machines. ABP is usually enough, combined with firefox (turn off the default allowed exceptions). You will want to put ABP on chrome (if they use chrome) and a tracking protection list (TPL, like abp but without customization; it's just a block-list) in IE as a precaution as well. This will help prevent most stray clicks and bad sites, but won't protect them from being naive and clicking yes to everything like a monkey. It's actually not so much porn sites as it is junkware and stray clicks giving them payloads that they click yes to without thinking, along with non-updated/unpatched software.

[bungiefan]

http://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/

Burn that to CD or use a bootable flash drive and you can erase the admin user password. Also, it's not hard to find a retail Win7 ISO to burn to disc or a bootable flash drive to just do a clean non-OEM install whenever you need to reinstall. I don't usually bother with vendor OS install discs with all the stuff that comes in their image that I don't want.

[Elizara]

Bungie; All of our pcs are custom built, so it's just general OEM, but it's still annoying when she loses her windows CD. I'll see if I can talk her into adblocker though, tho she swears that makes her system crash. (Balderdash, I say but what do I know?)

She told me she managed to clean it off, but I'll see if i can make her a rescue CD for next time. Her system seems to be funkeh anyway, maybe something she installed, but since it's not my pc I can't go diagnose it to figure out what's messing things up. Thanks though. ^^