Sarasota PC Monitor
Practicing the Black Art (09/03)
You Are Being Watched
by Vinny La Bash, vlabash@home.com
Member of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc.Recently, one of my colleagues was unable to teach and I was asked to temporarily take over her class. She told me that all the machines were working OK, but they seemed more "sluggish" than usual. The customary performance checks revealed nothing out of the ordinary, but every PC was slow or not quite right in one oddball way or another. On a hunch, I downloaded and installed Spybot from PepiMK Software and found a new meaning to the term "shock and awe." Every piece of equipment was infected with Spyware. Most machines had dozens of infections. One unit reported 248 infestations. After exterminating the uninvited guests, everything returned to normal. This experience led me to wonder how many of us are unwittingly being spied upon by malicious software in our systems. You've been warned about computer viruses, Trojan horses, worms, and other computer pests that bedevil us computer folk. A relatively new kind of threat appearing on our machines is something called Spyware. Your anti-virus program is not equipped to combat this threat, and neither is your firewall. What is spyware? It's a piece of software designed to specifically collect information from your computer that identifies you and transmits it from your machine to someplace on the internet without your knowledge or permission.
Spyware is also Internet jargon for Advertising Supported software (Ad-ware). It came about as a means for shareware programmers to make money from their efforts in addition to selling to customers. Companies with big advertising budgets place banner ads in these programs in exchange for a portion of the revenue from sales. This way, you don't have to pay for the software and the developers still make money. If you find the banners annoying, there is usually an option to remove them, by paying the regular licensing fee. This is a very nice arrangement for the shareware programmer. Advertisers pay to get the ads in. People who download the program must pay to have them removed. The very name Spyware conjures up images of illegal doings and cloak-and-dagger activities. Yet Spyware, despite its name, is not illegal in any way. Ethical Ad-ware companies will disclose what kind of data is being collected through their privacy statements. This still leaves you with no knowledge control over how such data will be used or distributed. A more serious consideration is that the kind of information being broadcast about you could be more than just your web hangouts. Most organizations attempting to collect information have nothing more sinister in mind than trying to persuade you to buy their products or services. Unfortunately, there are also those who are after your credit card number, financial information or your identity. What can you do to protect yourself, your privacy, and your data from malicious organizations and individuals? PepiMK Software distributes Spybot, an anti-Ad-ware program that is marvelously effective in detecting and removing this mole-like software from your system. Spybot will remove adware, spyware, keyloggers, dialers, and Trojans. As a bonus, it will find and clean usage tracks, which act like fingerprints in your system. Where you go on the web is nobody's business except your own. Usage tracks were meant to be an aid to people by internally (within Windows) keeping track of what information you access, so if you needed to access the data at a later time, you could do it quickly, and with little effort. Spyware collects and transmits this data to whoever its master is, and you don't know a thing about it. Spybot's Search and Destroy feature will remove some of the more common tracks on your system, providing a level of protection no other program can match. Installation is easy and using the program is a model of simplicity. Follow the Wizard's directions and it's difficult to go wrong.
To get Spybot, go to Google, type in "Spybot" (not the quotes), click on the" I'm Feeling Lucky" button, and you will be transported to the PepiMK Software home page where you can download the latest version of this program at no charge. The author works on donations, so feel generous, and allow your better instincts to support his efforts on your behalf.
You can also visit http://www.lavasoftusa.com/ and get Ad-Aware, a program that is a good complement to Spybot. There is a new variation of Spyware that is very insidious and very difficult for current anti-Spyware programs to detect. It's called RapidBlaster and installs itself to run when you start your PC. It then transmits advertising messages from its headquarters to your machine, and displays them at irregular intervals. This inclines you think that the web site you're visiting at the time generating the popup ad. You turn your attention and wrath to an innocent party, and never suspect the real guilty party, RapidBlaster. The vermin controlling RapidBlaster have created a new variant that changes its identity. The program's home base sends a new installation file that installs itself into a new folder with a different name. All the previously installed folders and files are then deleted, and the program runs from its new location on your PC. Fred Langa calls it a "software cockroach", and rightly so.
If you suspect you've been invaded by a software cockroach or wish to exercise caution, download RapidBlaster Killer from http://www.wilderssecurity.net. While you're on the site, check out their version of anti-Spyware called SpyWare Blaster.
The bad guys are getting more ingenious then ever. Let's hope the guys with the white hats can keep up with them.
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Copyright 2003. This article is from the September 2003 issue of the Sarasota PC Monitor, the official monthly publication of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc., P.O. Box 15889, Sarasota, FL 34277-1889. Permission to reprint is granted only to other non-profit computer user groups, provided proper credit is given to the author and our publication. We would appreciate receiving a copy of the publication the reprint appears in, please send to above address, Attn: Editor. For further information about our group, email: admin@spcug.org/ Web: http://www.spcug.org/
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