SpyAxe: This Year's Nastiest, Most Pervasive Rogue Anti-Spyware Application

Many security forums and security blogs are buzzing around the 'net with much talk about SpyAxe.

• Fact: Computer Associates Security Advisor page suggests that SpyAxe gets onto susceptible Windows machines through a vulnerability in Internet Explorer. Web sites with the hidden 'Trojan-Downloader.Win32.Zlob' pass on SpyAxe as its "payload."
   
• Fact: Anti-virus firm F-Secure reports that up to twenty-five hundred (2500!) new machines per hour are infected with SpyAxe.
   
• Fact: Lavasoft quickly discovered as many as five new SpyAxe variants per week are installed onto users' machines. (A dragon with many heads?) That makes uninstalling this pest a real problem!

SpyAxe has made a strong push to be this year's nastiest, most pervasive rogue anti-Spyware application yet. So it was no surprise that Infopackets Reader Austen K. was not able to completely remove SpyAxe after following Nick's SpyAxe uninstall fix.

About 90 minutes before Austen posted his HijackThis! log on my Countermeasures Extraction forum, yet another SpyAxe variant was discovered by security experts. The new SpyAxe included a derivative .DLL file ("wbeconm.dll"), and was bundled with another rogue anti-Spyware application, called Winhound. These new files (along with different registry entries) invalidated previous SpyAxe uninstall methods.

But not all hope was lost.

Thankfully, an update for the anti-malware tools was immediately made available, and the fix was an roaring success. Other than downloading the most up-to-date anti-malware tools, there was nothing else different in Nick's instructions to remove SpyAxe.

The moral of the Story: as long as SpyAxe continues to mutate, security experts will persist in their efforts to overcome. The most important thing to remember is to stay up to date with Windows update, and make absolutely sure you have downloaded the latest security tools mentioned in Nick's Spy Axe removal post.

SpyAxe: Additional Help Available

Should you happen to be infected with SpyAxe and you've followed Nick's removal instructions carefully (as well as the above instructions), you are welcome to stop by my forum for additional help.

Surf Safe, and Surf Secure!