what the heck is Freepod on AIM?

Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
I went over to my girlfriend's apartment last night and as soon as I walked in the door her roomie ran over, practically in tears. She was IM'ing on AIM on her Dell laptop when she received a message from one of her buddies that read "hey, check out this link". She clicked on it and something called Freepod Toolbar downloaded to her laptop. Then, this thing contacted everyone in her buddy list and sent the same message. It happend so quickly that she didn't have time to quit AIM before it blitzed all her buddies.



In an effort to uninstall this thing, I first tried through add/remove programs to uninstall. It seemed to work, but when we restarted the computer, the first thing to pop up after the log in screen was a progress bar "downloading freepod".



So then I did a search for all the files on the computer that had been modified or created in the previous twenty minutes. I deleted anything that had freepod in the name and any .exe files. We restarted the computer and the damn thing downloaded itself again.



So I am at a bit of a loss as to what to do. Adaware and Norton Anti Virus won't touch this thing. Short of reformatting and reinstallation, I don't know what to do next.



What the hell is Freepod, and how do I get rid of it?



PS: my iBook is blissfully unaffected!

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 3
    gene cleangene clean Posts: 3,481member
    Download Spybot Search & Destroy from here



    If this can't help you.. it's a tough cookie.
  • Reply 2 of 3
    kishankishan Posts: 732member
    thanks, I'll give it a shot. When I google searched for freepod and AIM, I was suprised to see that there was very little out there on it. I figured an AIM spread thing like this would get a huge amount of attention. I guess not.
  • Reply 3 of 3
    I did some research and found that this is some very nasty malware. It appears that a lot of people have been infected by it and its removal is quite hard. But not impossible.



    Follow these instructions and hopefully you have a winner. A similar situation with very detailed help on how to remove the malware is posted here as well.



    Good luck!
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