SpyWare? What?
People often ask me why I hate PCs and Microsoft so much. Here’s a good reason:
Last week, I started seeing a whole new kind of spam on my PC. System messages like this one started showing up on my screen at strange times. They look like Windows systems messages, but they were always advertising something.
I ran the version of Ad Aware that I had installed on my machine, but it didn’t find anything. So I uninstalled AIM, thinking maybe that was the root of the problem. (And besides: why use AIM when there’s Trillian around?). But that didn’t clear up the issue. Over the past couple days, I started getting the messages more frequently…at least once a day.
Then I realized that it had been six months since I installed Ad Aware, and that there were probably new updates. Which there were. When I ran Ad Aware this morning (after being greeted almost immediately after booting up by a spamming system message), it found 14 different spyware programs on my beloved PC. Most of them were Brilliant Digital’s handiwork, which you can read about here. I had installed (and then uninstalled) KaZaa two months ago, but I guess Brilliant Digital is a “sleeper” program that “detonates” weeks after being installed. And I guess uninstalling KaZaa doesn’t uninstall Brilliant Digital’s programs. Lovely.
Pro for Windows: Has programs like Kazaa/etc available natively.
Con for Windows: Such useful programs often install awful applications like the one described above.
And as a sidenote: can any Mac user out there even fathom of NOT knowing which apps have been installed on your own damn machine? Shudder.
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5 Replies to “SpyWare? What?”
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Sadly, looks like the system messages are NOT a secret program somewhere on my machine, looks like they’re actually coming from the outside. I’ve set up a personal firewall that will hopefully help with the problem.
jesus christ, they can do that? god damn.
yeah they could do that —- form a packet that sends ActiveX code that triggers windows system events that cause popup errors and fill them with diff content.
I actually remember a Mac program that did this, we used it as a joke to fuck with people at work — they would get messages like “Your current program has shut down becuase you are to stupid to use it.” —- the big difference was you had to install the application on both machines — you couldn’t simply trigger a system event via the network. That might be possible nowadays on a mac if they have “remote apple events” enabled and a permanent IP. — mmm, that’d be fun to do to kev. — 🙂
Read more about the issue here.