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A company that develops antispyware software believes it has found a massive identity theft ring that appears to be using the evil and persistent CoolWebSearch spyware program. Anyone who's been unfortunate enough to be infected with CoolWebSearch knows that a bear it is to remove. If Sunbelt Software is correct, while it clings to your hard drive it's sending private information to evildoers: In some recent research into a spyware exploit, our research team has discovered a massive identity theft ring. We also found the keylogger transcript files that are being uploaded to the servers. This is real spyware stuff-chat...

Antispyware firm warns of massive ID theft ring After stumbling on the ring, Sunbelt Software called in the FBI News Story by Jaikumar Vijayan AUGUST 05, 2005 (COMPUTERWORLD) - Officials at Sunbelt Software, a Clearwater, Fla.-based vendor of antispyware tools, said the company stumbled upon a massive ID theft ring that is using a well-known spyware program to break into and systematically steal confidential information from an unknown number of computers worldwide. The operation was discovered yesterday during research Sunbelt was doing on a spyware program belonging to a particularly dangerous class of browser hijacking tools called CoolWebSearch (CWS), according...

In less than two years, CoolWebSearch has become the bane of the computing industry. Its programmers have managed to reset Web browsers so that searches get rerouted to the CoolWeb search engine. And any time anti-spyware engineers find a way to stop the hijacking, a new variant pops up, sneakier than its predecessor. There are now dozens. "It's a cat-and-mouse game almost," said Tim Bryan, an InterMute Inc. software developer in charge of fighting CoolWebSearch. There are less pernicious forms of spyware, of course. And there is what's more properly termed adware because many such programs don't actually harvest data...

You may have heard of this lately, or perhaps have had it happen to you. That's right...your internet browser gets hijacked. Taken from your control, as it were. It takes you to sites you would never have visited in a million years; your computer slows down and maybe crashes; your homepage is mysteriously changed; you now have about a dozen "favorites" that you never selected and don't want. You've been HIJACKED! What happened? How? You ask, as you pull your hair out in disgust. Well, it happened to me,, and some FReepers I know, and a LOT of my friends,...

I suspect I have some sort of hijack software that has change the way my searches on Google come up. Until very recently google searcehs were quick and I would get responses as normal. Now it seems to freeze for a few seconds and the first page of responses are links to other ad or search services. Example for a google search for 'test' I get this on the 1st page: 100% Free Certifications and Elearning Certy.com offers Free certifications/tests in HTML, Java, ASP, C#, Project Management, English, XML, EJB Diabetics! Health Break Through! At last..there's hope for Diabetes sufferers....