Make your computer like new, remove the spyware.
A spam that I’v received quite a few copies of recently:
95% of home computers are infected with spyware, is your computer one of them?
Spyware can:
- Monitor your personal info (Chat Logs, Passwords, Emails, SSN)
- Dramatically Slow Down your computer, until it crashes
- Flood you with aggressive Pop-ups and Commercials
- Hide on your PC un-revealed by Anti-Virus or Firewall Programs
- Sometimes even result in Credit Card Fraud or Identity Theft!
All true.
But don’t ever download software from spam. Ever. OK, if you are a computer security researcher and have the right tools, then go ahead. If you aren’t a pro, don’t do it.
The link (not shown) is to a domain “*.free*spyware.com” (the * represents something that I prefer not to reveal, because I don’t want to send anybody that way) which is almost certainly an honest description of the product.
It is very likely that the messages I got were sent (withou their knowledge or consent) by people who clicked the link.
A lot of people think “hey, I don’t have anything worth hacking on my computer” but these days, what the bad guys want is to use your computer to attack other computers. Precautions you take protect not just you, but the online community.
There are several good (and quite a few bad) tools out there to protect your system. For spyware, I use AdAware and SpyBot Search and Destroy, both of which have entirely usable free versions. Use a search engine to find these tools. I’m not including the links because at this point I hope you are feeling kind of paranoid.
Why are links and downloadable files in web sites OK and in email not? Because web sites are traceable and don’t spread. If a link on a web site turns out to be toxic, you (or a law enforcement professional) probably track down the person or entity responsible. And the site can be shut down. With email, there usualy no good way to be sure who is responsible - even if you tnow what machine it came from, in many cases that machine has been hijacked. And spam email just keeps coming…
There are two major exceptions to web links being reasonably safe:
1) Spyware. The trick is that in most cases it isn’t illegal. You download a supposedly free program, click “I Accept the long boring license agreement I didn’t read” and bang: you’ve essentially sold your computer to the bad guys for the price of a crappy little program. Don’t do that. Do a quick search (google, for example) on the program or the company that sells it - read comments people have made about it. And don’t click “I accept” unless you have a pretty good reason to think it is OK - you’ve read and understood the agreement, and/or you trust the company.
2) Spoof pages. You get to these mostly by clicking links in spam. They look like your bank’s page, or eBay, or something else legitimate. Type in your password, and you’ve just cloned yourself. Except that your clone only makes withdrawals, never deposits. The link looked like eBay, but when you got there, the URL in that box at the top of your browser (which you probably didn’t read) said something odd. That’s why you don’t click links in email, you get to the page some other way - type it in the URL box, use the bookmark you made, look them up on Google.
