Victory in my home

Tonight when I was trying Dean Edwards' noIE script, I discovered a new button in IE's toolbar. And if you care, the button had a label of SideFind. Don't ask me what it is as I didn't click on that.

WTF! I didn't install that. I immediate went to Add/Remove Programs and discovered 5 to 6 more spywares (including 180solutions, IST, Internet Optimizer, WebFldrs). One virus was also quarantined by NAV.

Again, the most likely cause is that my sister was using IE when I was not at home. Then when she read her Yahoo! mails, all those spywares and viruses just went wild...

I immediately tried to uninstall them. For one of the spywares (Internet Optimizer), I even need to kill the process with Task Manager before uninstalling it. Sign...

I feel unsafe. Therefore I told my sister not to use IE for browsing anymore. I even set Firefox as the default browser and hide the shortcuts to IE with Set Program Access and Defaults.

She agreed to use Firefox from now on.

My sister, like most of the innocent internet users, doesn't really care about what software to use. Also, like many people out there, she didn't know this little fox is a browser, even if I frequently use it. :-P

We really need to spread the words and let more (non-techical, non-geek) people to know about those alternative browsers (and why to switch).

Edited: WebFldrs is a Windows component, not a spyware. Sorry... :-P