Spex Internet has nothing to do with Spyware infections
Updated 2/7/2004
Spex has created this page in response to emails and phone calls we have received from people complaining that their web browser homepage has been set to display a page called spex/start.html. Other people have said that their computer is 'infected' in some way.
Spex Internet has nothing to do with this problem - we are just unlucky to share a name with it! We didn’t write it.
We can’t remove the spex worm from your computer – but we can point you in the direction of some people who can.
How did you get infected in the first place?
The odds are that you were infected by a piece of software you have downloaded or a malicious email. Worm or virus infections can be minimised through the use of a firewall and a virus checker.Spyware can be more difficult to avoid - if you visit a website and get a popup box asking you to install a toolbar or some other utility that you didn't specifically request you should think twice before downloading. Again, there are SpyWare removal tools - but the best tactic is not to get infected in the first place.
It's probably Spyware..
It now seems almost certain that the problem is caused by a piece of Spyware that hijacks your homepage setting.Spex was contacted on Sat 26/6/04 by a person who could not remove the spex Spyware with the following Spyware removal tools:
- CWShredder
- spybot
- ad-aware
- spywareblaster
- freshdownload
- spywareguard
Here's how one person fixed it..
"I use MS Windows XP Professional and I was affected by the SPEX homepage hijack. Which not only changed my homepage to spex.html it also caused a lot of pop ups to occur and i mean a lot, roughly 1 even second. Anyway i eventually tracked it down to a DLL file called "something.dll" without the quotes it was lurking in the temp directory of my user. I could not delete this while the pc was running. I had to boot from another partition and then delete it. When i had done this i no longer got the pop ups and i was able to get rid of the spex homepage. It may be different for other people but i suggest you look in temp directories, windows/system32 and user application data directories for this dll."Let us know if you find a cure
If you manage to remove the spex spyware from your machine please Contact Us and we will post the fix here so that others can use it.It probably isn't the W32.Spex.Worm
The problem could also be caused by the W32.Spex.Worm virus. However, W32.Spex.Worm has been infecting computers since July 2003 and we have only been receiving emails on the topic since June 21st 2004, so it is less likely that it is the cause of the problems.
