NEWS ARCHIVE
Edafio Technologies Unveils New Branding Campaign
Virus Prevention: A Big Concern for Business
Five Tips for Spurning Spyware and Browser Hijackers
Spies and Spooks
Nefarious spyware is trying to turn your computer into a
zombie. Here’s how to prevent infiltration.
BY ERIC E. HARRISON
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
Little Rock, AR (December 28, 2004)
Most people surf the Internet without a care in the world. But if you take to the World Wide Web, it would be wise to take some precautions. A spy could be watching over your shoulder, tracking your every move.
The spy isn’t a member of an al-Qaida sleeper cell — it’s a little piece of software, called "spyware" It could be just an innocent method of directing your attention to advertisements tailored to your taste. Or it could be a tool for criminals to steal your identity and clean out your bank account. Spyware is a common name for any type of program that executes on your system without your knowledge and could relay this information back to an unauthorized third party, according to the Consortium of Anti-Spyware Technology vendors (COAST), a nonprofit organization that lets members collaborate on increasing awareness of what it calls a growing spyware problem.
"Spyware and other similar programs perform various activities ranging from displaying pop-up ads to collecting personal information," according to Edafio Technologies, a Little Rock technology management company that is offering a free "webinar," or Internet-based seminar, to help Web surfers guard against spyware infiltration. The "webinar" is available at Edafio’s Web site: www.edafio. com/webinars/webinars_0001. html.
Spyware can lurk in supposedly free downloads such as file-sharing software, Internet toolbars, Web games and Web assistants — in fact, the reason those downloads are free to you in many cases is that many developers sell ad space — and through pop-up windows and "spam" e-mails. "At its most innocent, spyware monitors your surfing patterns on the Web and then delivers to you advertisements in the form of pop-up windows that are things you might be interested in," says Elizabeth Bowles, president of Arkansas-based Internet service provider Aristotle.
"For example, there’s this little weather bug [downloadable from weatherbug.com] that sits on your desktop and gives you the local weather," she says. "Those are things that you, as a customer, affirmatively go out and look for and download onto your computer because they have some value to you. "In return for getting your local weather, ... you agree that they’re going to be able to monitor your surfing habits and give you advertisements." (The Weatherbug people have since announced that they have joined COAST and are no longer sending out weather bugs with spyware.) "It’s supposedly [with] customer consent, although most people don’t realize when they are downloading these little weather bugs or news tickers... that they’re agreeing — it’s buried in the privacy policy," which most people don’t read all the way through, "if they click on it at all," Bowles says.
'IT GOES DOWNHILL'
Spyware, from there, she says, gets progressively nastier. "You have
forms of spyware that are delivered through popup windows, [which] will appear
on your computer and it’ll say, ‘Click here to close,’ and
when you click there to close, it downloads a piece of spyware on your computer.
"Some of these pop-up windows have an extra ‘x’ next to the
big ‘x,’ and you click on it thinking you’re going to click
to close, and instead you get spyware."
Spyware, she says, is also delivered through spam, the popular name for unsolicited commercial e-mail. "The relationship between spam and spyware is pretty thick," she says. "It’s generally not going to be spam from a company you know, but nonetheless, those are completely without the consumer’s knowledge — they get deposited on your computer and you have no idea that they’re there. "When you go further into the spyware world, some of them pretend to be the kind that deliver you advertisements, but in fact have a program that runs behind [them] that combs your hard drive for personal data and delivers that back to the person that runs the spyware — it’s a form of identity theft."
And it can get even worse than that. "It’s not really a problem for people who use dial-up [connections ], but a risk for people who broadband is [spyware] that will deposit a virus onto your computer that will turn your computer into a spam zombie, so it sends out spam when you’re not on the computer." The faster your connection, the more attractive your computer is to spammers. "That’s what the spammers are looking for — connections that will let them send out millions and millions of e-mails in 30 minutes," Bowles says.
To get around effective current anti-spam software, spammers are now gathering
their "zombie" resources. "It’s basically like a relay
race where you pass the baton off — they’ve got whole networks of
zombies, and what they’re doing now is they send [e-mails ] in little
spurts, from all these different computers. "Instead of sending a million
from one computer, they’re sending 10, 15, 20 from 10,000 computers.
It ends up being the same number of e-mails, but it doesn’t get caught
by the filters." And, she says, "The really new thing in spam, according
to the Federal Trade Commission, is Mexican gangs, believe it or not. It’s
becoming a kind of organized-crime situation. They’re banding together
and pooling their zombie networks and creating, oh I don’t know, ‘superzombies.’"
In other words, a computer version of Night of the Living Dead.
DEFENDING AGAINST SPIES
Bowles recommends a few simple steps to avoid contracting spyware from the
Internet. "I recommend — and I’m very adamant about this; this
is a bright-line rule — that you never click on a pop-up. Never click
through a piece of spam. If you’re interested in the product, look for
it on the Internet, go the Web site that’s being advertised if you want,
but do not everopen spam. Do not ever click on a pop-up." And when installing
downloaded software that you think might contain spyware, Edafio recommends
that, when possible, you "try installing using the ‘Custom Installation’
option rather than the ‘Automatic Installation’ method. "Another
prevention method is to purchase the full versions of spyware removal software
rather than using the basic free versions," the company says. Full versions
can include virus protection and pop-up blockers that free versions lack.
Edafio’s site and Bowles agree that almost all spyware is aimed at Microsoft products; folks who work on Macintosh computers or who use non-Microsoft e-mail and Internet applications are, if not completely immune, at much less risk. "If you’re using a mail client other than [Microsoft’s] Outlook, if you’re using a browsing engine other than Internet Explorer, [spyware] greenfly won’t work because [just about] all of them are targeted toward a Microsoft platform," Bowles explains. "The programmers are focused on ‘Where am I going to hit?’ And that’s 80 percent of the population, and that’s not Mac.
"OS X [Macintosh’s latest operating system], it’s —
I don’t want to say bulletproof, but it’s a very good system where
this kind of thing is concerned." An Edafio spokesman concurs : "Mac
OS X doesn’t offer nearly as many places for this type of parasitic software
to ‘hide.’ Windows users are so much more prevalent than Mac users
that programmers designing malware [viruses and spyware ] focus only on Windows
environments for their parasitic programs." In fact, Edafio is gearing
its "webinar" exclusively to users of Microsoft Windows operating
systems, 98 to XP.
FLUSHING IT OUT
How do you know if you have spyware on your computer? According to Edafio’s
"webinar," you should be able to recognize these symptoms:
However, if the spyware is designed to collect personal information, it may not cause any of these symptoms, according to the "webinar." And what if you discover that in fact your computer has a bad case of spyware? Bowles recommends downloading spy-killer programs from the Internet — and no, they don’t come with additional spyware. "I’ve downloaded something called Spybot [www.safer-net working.org/microsoft.en.html]," she says. "It’s free. I like it; I think it works really well." It does have drawbacks — any time you try to make a change in any software it sends up an alert that somebody is trying to alter your hard drive, even if you’re doing it yourself. And its Search and Destroy function, Bowles says, "goes out and nukes all of the spyware on your computer, including your cookies. You have to decide whether you want it to get rid of your cookies or not." (Cookies, Bowles stresses, "are not spyware — a cookie is a way for a Web site to know that that computer that accessed it is the one that accessed it before.") You can set up the search and destroy function to selectively toss your cookies, letting you pick which cookies to keep and which to delete.
Microsoft also makes spywareremoval tools available via its support site,
support.microsoft.com. Some, though
not all, commercially available anti-virus software packages will also delete
spyware. "You can search on the Internet, but you’re better off
calling a computer store or your Internet service provider for recommendations,"
Bowles says. "This is a case where you can’t trust what you find
on the Internet." Particularly, she says, don’t trust pop-up ads
that warn that you may have spyware or that profess to sell anti-spyware devices.
"Anybody who uses a pop-up window to advertise an anti-spyware solution,
you’ve got to look twice at that guy," she says.
BY ERIC E. HARRISON © ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE Little Rock, AR (December 28, 2004)
