The State of the Spyware Problem

SpywareInfo periodically puts out a newsletter. Contained in the latest issue is an article called "I Love The Smell Of Spyware Burning In The Morning".

It documents the spyware situation as it is today, even through the drive-by installation in casually surfing the web.

The article, at least to me, was quite entertaining, and an eye opener. Maybe it helps to be a little geeky to find it entertaining, but I've a feeling more than geeks will enjoy the read.

Keep in mind, this is a guy that is well versed in spyware removal, running the SpywareInfo forum. With the situation driving him up the wall, you can imagine the hopelessness of those less familiar.

/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wow.gif
What a whoopin' that one was.

Lotsa good info though. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

Edit: Just downloaded Killbox. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif

Great article! I recently went through a spyware infection and ended up formatting my drive. I bookmarked that article for future reference, although hopefully I'll never need it.

interesting read, wonder why didn't run adware and sypbot first?

In my case Ad-aware and Spybot didn't remove everything. Spyware kept reappearing on reboot or Adaware would crash while scanning.

Wow, what an eye opener, thanks Empath.
I am a relative novice with the whole computer thing, so it is refreshing to know folks are out there that watch for this stuff.

I am still awaiting a simple solution to these problems (like a single comprehensive bundled program with firewall, antivirus, spyware detector/remover).

It seems that no one product can do it all...yet.

Come on, Empath--write up a program, we need it!

Bob

My cable provider has a software bundle like that. When I downloaded it my system kept crashing and had to remove it. Later I may try to load one at a time to see which was causing the problem.

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I have spent the last two days playing with VMWare and decided Tuesday to go visit a certain wrestling fan site, a site infamous for installing all manner of spyware. I was told that this site was guaranteed to be a rich hunting ground for spyware. The person who said that sure wasn't kidding.

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I wonder which wrestling fan site the writer is referring to ... I frequent a few wrestling fan sites, and based on his article, am starting to worry ... /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/confused.gif

Interesting article. It seems like avoiding IE and active X will help a lot, and don't downlload crap from the interenet, which should be common sense.

Very interesting. Thanks for the post Empath. Looks like a glimpse of the future to come. I just hope the Goodguys keep up with the Badguys so we can continue to enjoy our virtual world.

Greg

Spyware can be a real pain. It may seem just annoying at times but if your computer gets too much spyware installed, other than slowing down your machine, it can prevent your computer from receiving and running updates. That, in turn, leaves your computer vulnerable to virus and other malicious code.

My recommendation would be to get one (or more) of the anti-spyware products (the free ones work OK). Run them once or twice a month.

This goes in turn with:
- keeping your OS and software patched
- running a firewall
- running (and keeping updated) a antivirus product

A layered defence works best. Don't just rely on one of the above.

Paul

I used to use AdAware and Spybot, until one of the folks at my wife's office (for which I'm the tech guy, in my copious spare time), got a really brutal infection that just wouldn't go away - it was bad enough that it loaded itself into system memory in SAFE MODE!!!!!!

I was about to format the drive (huge hassle - this machine has all kinds of proprietary software that requires about a day to reload), when I read about SpySweeper on an anti-spyware forum.

I LOVE Spysweeper. It's not super-fast, but it seems to get and kill all kinds of things that AdAware and Spybot can't even see... I ran it about five times on the infected machine, alternating regular and safe modes, and it killed off the spyware beautifully.

Before you ask, it was an XPsp2 machine with all updates, behind the company firewall, and with the Windows Firewall running. The user clicked a link on a site for travel agents, and POW!

My 16 year old daughter likes to visit all kinds of shopping sites, chat sites, etc. on my home computer so I have had severe spyware problems with it. With spybot, adaware and spysweeper, and cleaning out the startup processes, I managed to get it clean. Using Mozilla has kept it clean.

We had a new laptop that we carried on trips for casual internet access. In a Vegas hotel we paid their outrageous $10/day access charge, connected out laptop, and it immediately became severely infected. With spybot, adaware and spysweeper I still haven't gotten it cleaned completely.

I had heard that Congress was considering anti-spyware legislation, and I thought that had lessened the spyware problem but maybe not. People that write viruses don't care about legality but people who buy advertising certainly do. If an illegal popup tries to sell you a hotel room for a national chain, it's pretty easy to determine who to levy the fines against, so eventually popup advertising could be eliminated.

Most of my previous problems stemmed from Internet Explorer. On my home machine I renamed IE and put a copy of notepad.exe in its place. It was amusing to see the popup varmints trying to load notepad.exe and run their websites. Strangely enough though some of the popups were still able to find IE and run it.

I tried this on my WinXP laptop and the next time I connected to the internet the darned thing immediately found, downloaded and installed IE again. Sounds like IE is as much of a virus as a real virus.

I was tortured with the a CWS (browser hijacker) varient for several months. To even open IE was was a misery! Firefox was a work-around, but the latest AdAware SE and Spybot revs finally removed it. That was several months ago, but left me really paranoid. I think the Feds recently passed legislation criminalizing spyware promulgators.(sp)

Larry

I made a automated restore dvd for my pc

in under 40 minutes my pc can be as good as new.

Well, I could start a rant about how disgusting the internet has become and about how pitiful mankind is, but I won't this time.
Guess Netscape is some kind of protection as I didn't have any apocalyptic problems yet ...
bernhard

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bjn70 said:
Sounds like IE is as much of a virus as a real virus.

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Everytime I do a system resote, ZoneAlarm alerts me that IE is trying to act as my server. I don't know what that means but I click "deny".

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markdi said:
I made a automated restore dvd for my pc

in under 40 minutes my pc can be as good as new.

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That is a great idea.

Is there a program that neatly allows you to set this up, or did you do it custom?

Bob