Tangled in Spyware:

The Houston Chronicle ^ | October 31, 2004 | Anick Jesdanun [Associated Press]

[quidnunc]

David Eckstein turned on his computer one day and launched his Web browser, just as he had every day. This time, however, CNN.com did not automatically open. Instead, the page was a search engine he'd never heard of.

Eckstein tried changing the browser settings back to CNN but the search engine would return whenever he rebooted. Finally, he just gave up.

The San Francisco marketing consultant is yet another victim of spyware, an amorphous class of software that mostly gets onto people's computers without their knowledge. So resource-hungry, it often renders the machines unusable.

"It makes you want to throw your computer out the window," Eckstein said.

In the past year, the problem has become epidemic as people spend more time online and spyware developers get more aggressive.

"It makes spam look like a walk in the park," said Bob Bowman, chief executive of Major League Baseball's Internet unit, which in June started banning new advertisers from using such techniques.

As part of a government-backed study, technicians visited Jenna Dye recently in Young Harris, Ga., and found 1,300 spyware-related items on her machine.

"It would shut itself down in the middle of doing stuff. We had lots of pop-ups. The (CD-ROM) drawers would pop open," the mother of two complained. "It's frustrating. We spent $1,800 on our computer and we didn't want to use it."

Until the machine was cleaned up, Dye and her husband would make 2 1/2 hour trips to the nearest mall to avoid shopping online. "We use it every day now again," she said.

Spyware was found on the computers of 80 percent of participants in the study, conducted by America Online Inc. and the National Cyber Security Alliance.

-snip-

[ForGod'sSake]

Spares the "victim" from seeing crap like CNN on the Internet.!!

heh heh, slipped one by this ol' country boy dincha???

FGS

[azhenfud]

"Eckstein tried changing the browser settings back to CNN but the search engine would return whenever he rebooted."

Disabling system restore is much more simple than giving up...

[Landru]

"heh heh, slipped one by this ol' country boy dincha???"

Yea, looks like it.

...& that ain't easy. {g}

[pghkevin]

for future reference, thanks.

[mentor2k]

I have Ad Aware 6 and recenty installed SpyBot S&D along with ZoneAlarm. SpyBot ran great for about a week but now it hangs when trying to remove the stuff it detected and I have to ctrl-alt-del. It shows it "not responding" so I don't know if I would recommend SpyBot or not.

[backhoe]

Thanks for looking.

[VOA]

bump

[backhoe]

I have Ad Aware 6 and recenty installed SpyBot S&D along with ZoneAlarm. SpyBot ran great for about a week but now it hangs when trying to remove the stuff it detected and I have to ctrl-alt-del. It shows it "not responding" so I don't know if I would recommend SpyBot or not.

Just a suggestion- your installation may be corrupted, either from malware ( many have code that jams up protective software ) or the orneryness associated with Windows- try uninstalling and a fresh reinstall from another download.

[Allan]

Run Adaware every day on bootup and Spybot once a week

Doesn't the latest version of Spybot immediately block any attempt to install spyware?

I find that when I run Spybot now there never is any spyware to be removed.

The story was much different when I used an older version of Spybot.

[grapeape]

I have caught the spyware naupoint. It is a search engine that just so happens to advertise anti- spyware. Isn't that just so convenient!! No one can get this thing off of my computer!!

[RadioAstronomer]

I had an ad-aware problem just two days ago. Loaded the new Ad-Aware SP and it works fine.