Spyware

Have you ever heard of spyware? If I may be so bold as to quote:

"Spyware is a broad category of malicious software intended to intercept or take partial control of a computer's operation without the user's informed consent. While the term taken literally suggests software that surreptitiously monitors the user, it has come to refer more broadly to software that subverts the computer's operation for the benefit of a third party."

As my PC operations (what exactly does that mean?) have moved to my old desktop PC owing to my now defunct laptop, I have been installing the various apps I use day-to-day. I came across and installed some spyware removal tools I had downloaded recently, namely, Ad-Aware and SpyBot.

Incredibly Ad-Aware (pictured top-left) found 230 suspect files and SpyBot (pictured right), which I ran afterwards, found an additional 25!

> Ad-Aware
> SpyBot
> Windows AntiSpyware (beta)

Comments

[Lee]

Your quote up there sounds like a description for a computer virus. I guess there's not much of a difference anyway.

When I read your blog I realised I hadn't used any anti-spyware products since before my last reinstall! Well if you just exercise the same caution and common sense with viruses you can avoid spyware pretty much.

StartupMonitor & Startup Control Panel:
http://www.mlin.net/StartupMonitor.shtml
2 great programs, very small and easy to use.

Spyware/malware info:
http://spywarewarrior.com/asw-features.htm
http://www.firewallguide.com/spyware.htm

No need to use IE, try these:
http://www.opera.com
http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/

[Darren]

Somehow I suddenly started getting IE popups which were totally unrelated to the page I was looking at - for example, even my router config page spawned junk pop-ups. I wonder how that happened.

It was quite satifying to zap so much spyware in one go ;)

[quik]

hijackthis....its the answer to all the problems. LSPFix as well

[Darren]

Thanks for the recommendations. Here are a couple of links I've found if anyone is interested in Hijackthis or LSPFix.

http://www.tomcoyote.org/hjt/
http://www.cexx.org/lspfix.htm