This weekend, my sons had friends over. These friends used my computer.

While I’m not sure where they went on the internet, I’m fairly sure it wasn’t a truly wholesome and family friendly joyride.

When I fired up my PC on Saturday night, I was greeted to the joys of SpyAxe being installed and a few extra special links added to my favorites. While the favorites are easy enough to clean up, removing SpyAxe is not.

For those unfamiliar with SpyAxe, let me give you my experience with it.

In my opinion, it’s extortion ware. It installs on your computer just by viewing a website, then appears in your tool pallet (by the system clock) and starts whining about how your machine is infected with spyware (yes it is… it has SpyAxe on it now!). The only way to fully remove it is to purchase their spyware removal tool. Finding the removal tool is easy enough, because your web browser is hijacked to go there, regardless of what you’ve set your default webpage to, every time you launch your browser. If you have the audacity to click on a link from your favorites, it tells you that you can’t go there because YOUR COMPUTER IS INFECTED WITH SPYWARE!

I truly hope there’s a special place in hell for people who write software like that… a place that involves stinging nettles being rammed into the orifice du jour with red hot pokers. Repeat daily for eternity.

I did find some tools to remove this little gem with, but they were sadly lacking. They would remove one part of the problem, but not another. Both Spybot Search & Destroy and Ad-Aware were also unable to correct the issue. I finally ended up scrubbing my C: drive and reinstalling windows.

The authors of SpyAxe claim that they don’t engage in such practices, but rather, some of their affiliates with less than shining morals are responsible. Why are they still affiliates then?

*sigh*

Apparently, as of November 25th, they’ve ported this little gem to affect the latest version of Firebox as well… so it doesn’t much matter what browser you use. I’ve now installed TeaTimer on my machine, which protects my registry and system files from being modified without my permission. Sure… it’s a pain in the ass, but it’s far easier than scrubbing my hard drive when things like this happen (and I would rather spend the afternoon formatting and reinstalling than give one cent to a software company that does such things).