Obnoxious pop-ups are resilient, but there's a way to remove them

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The Daily Breeze

Thursday, July 14, 2005

Obnoxious pop-ups are resilient, but there's a way to remove them
By James Derk

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Some background: You know you have the Aurora pop-ups if every minute while browsing you get a pop-up window with the word Aurora in the very top blue bar of Internet Explorer. (You also may see them called "Ceres.") These pop-ups are from a special type of adware called "transponders" that are designed to send information from your personal computer to computer servers worldwide.


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There are many transponders and it's hard to list them all, but if you visit this excellent info site at www.webhelper4u.com, you can find out more than you probably want to know.

So how to remove it? Go to My Computer and open the C drive. Go to Tools, then Folder Options. Go to View, then check "Show hidden files and folders." Then open the Windows folder (usually C:WINDOWS or C:WINNT) and see if you have a file called "nail.exe." If you do, join the infected club.

The manual way of removing it is quite complex. If you Google "nail.exe and Aurora" you will find a couple of methods and I will post one in my blog.

The Direct-Revenue people have set up a Web site with a removal tool at www.mypctuneup.com. (The funny part of calling this a "tuneup" is your PC wouldn't be sluggish in the first place if they hadn't infected it.)

I have tested this tool on three infected PCs and it removed the Aurora transponder if you allow it to connect to the Internet during the uninstall process. The folks at Web Helper (above) in an article dated May 25 on their home page also investigated what the mypctuneup.com application actually did and found this latest version is not harmful.

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You can find my column archive and blog at www.cyberdads.com/blog.html.


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http://www.dailybreeze.com/business/articles/1693717.html

[Raiden]

1. Aurora was a BITCH!

Every five minutes I got a pop-up. I downloaded anti-Aurora software from majorgeeks.com and the problem has been pretty much erased.