A PS Guard Story

I thought I would share my experience with the desktop and browser hijackers that were installed on my computer from a company called PS Guard.

I am not a computer expert, but I do use my computer extensively in my business as an advertising creative guy. I use the normal Microsoft proucts, like Word and Excel. I have XP for my operating system and have been using Internet Explorer as my browser.

About 10 days ago, while online, I received a pop-up message from a spyware company called PS Guard. I x'ed out the pop-up and within minutes my desktop displayed a black screen with a warning that my computer might be infected with a virus. I ran my spyware and anti-virus software and sure enough, they found spyware from PS Guard and a whole bunch of traces of it throughout my machine.

I called Microsoft for support and over the next week, spent a total of 13 hours on the phone with various MS support people, none of whom could correct the problem. In fact, none of them even knew what PS Guard was. By the end of all of my sessions with MS, my computer was essentially trashed. I finally broke down and took my computer to the Geek Squad at Best Buy. They found over 275 traces of the PS Guard bug on my computer, with many of the traces imbedded in my registry files. When they tried to delete those files from my registry, it turned out that you could not alter them. The tech cleaned up my machine, took all of the software off, ran system integrity checks, and reinstalled my software. The computer is now running fine.

I have installed Spysweeper anti-spyware and an anti-virus program called Titanium from Panda Software. So far, all is good.

I just wanted to post to let you know that I do use the internet, but mostly or client research and occasionally to check local movie times, etc. I am not off surfing wildly all over the place and I still got this bug. I have decided to switch to the Mozilla Firefox browser as I do not feel IE is safe anymore. I am also going to spend as little time on-line as possible.

If any of you get the PS Guard bug or any of it's components, take it seriously. This is a company that hijacks your computer and holds it or ransom until you buy their software. If you do get it, proceed carefully. I do believe that all of the power-ups and power-downs that MS had me do, as well as all of the changes they made to my computer during the diagnostic process surely contributed to the ultimate crash of the machine. Unless you fully understand what you are doing, call a professional and have them do it. I was lucky. The tech scanned all of my documents and put them on DVDs for me as a back-up so I didn't loose any valuable date.

So again, take this PS thing seriously. It's a virulent bug.

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