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The Spyware Horror
Beware, Web Surfers! There is a malignant evil on the net known as SPYWARE! What is Spyware, my children? Lemme tell ya! If you’re unfortunate enough to click on the wrong section of an internet pop-up ad, you can contract this blood-sucking parasite which leeches onto the hard drive of your computer! The same thing can happen if you download a software application on the net. What can spyware do to your computer? Its nefarious tentacles can bombard you with a plethora of pop-up ads (many of them X-rated), install computer viruses, and steal passwords to e-mail and bank accounts. It can even steal keystroke passwords (those thingies that look like asterisks) to your internet account, enabling a 3rd party to redial your internet connection and rack up massive long distance phone bill charges. Imagine your shock when you open up your phone bill and find a $1500 charge for calls to such exotic vacation spots as Tirana and Lahore!
You don’t even have to download software or click on a pop-up to get infected with this infernal internet pest. I learned this from personal experience. One day after being on a site which I frequent, I noticed that the processing speed of my computer had slowed down to the pace of an arthritic slug; my homepage had been redirected to a third rate huckster site known as Blazefind.com. Trying to reset my homepage was futile; I kept being drawn back to Blazefind.com like a paper clip to a magnet. The toolbar on my browser was reconfigured automatically, guiding me to a bunch of sites hawking everything from presidential candidates to penile enlargers. (Isn’t that the same thing?)
All of this was symptomatic of one thing: SPYWARE! The equivalent of a West Nile-infected mosquito was sucking the blood out of the hard drive of my computer! How did this happen? I subsequently learned that the Internet Explorer browser (which I use) has a component known as Active X, which sounded like an anime character to me. If you’re unfortunate to be on the wrong website (which I was), it can instruct Active X to download spyware software from the site’s backgound (which it did). THAT is how this hellspawn found its way onto my computer!
I decided to vanquish this internet vampire by logging off the web and activating the "software saints" that could do battle with this fearsome monster: Ad-aware and Spybot, two programs designed to eradicate the Spyware menace. The problem was more extensive than I thought, however. I had to run two passes on Spybot to get all the crap out of my computer, including a reboot. I made a call to a computer maven friend of mine, who told me to go onto the net to upgrade my Ad-aware program to deal with this fearsome beast. After I did this, I ran the program, which exposed 100 heretofore undiscovered spyware programs (many of them porn junk). All of this travail was worth it; my computer version of a high colonoscopy flushed all the crap out of my hard drive.
However, a mounting anger was starting to well up inside me. Why do I have to contend with this bullshit? In fact, why does ANYONE have to?!?
If I sound angry now, this could be described as a low level anxiety attack compared to way I felt three months ago. At that time, Spybot and Ad-aware were not loaded onto my computer. There were two consequneces to this omission. First, the homepage of my computer was re-directed to a 10th rate huckster site known as XUPITER--for those familiar with it, that word probably just made the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. Second, when I was redirected to this hellhole, I found that my computer monitor had turned ghostly white. The only way to get out of this site was to reboot my computer. Adding to this indignity was the fact this Spyware crap was slowing my processor speed to an inert standstill. Web surfing turned into web crawling. I tried to download Spybot and Ad-aware from their internet sites but it was a no-go. The Spyware in my computer was so advanced and entrenched that it PREVENTED me downloading the software! Fortunately, I have a friend named Tim who is something of a computer expert and all-around good guy. He downloaded the Ad-aware and Spybot programs onto CD-ROMs and installed them onto my computer. Voila! The transformation was miraculous. Now that the Spyware was "exorcised" from my computer, the damned thing ran like new.
I was fortunate to get Tim to help me, but there are obviously millions of computer users who were in the same sorry shape that I was in. What does the government have to say about the unwelcome intrusion that millions of computer users suffer when blighted by Spyware? The Federal Trade Commission says that computer users are on their own to protect their computers from these advertising "parasites," but they say they are looking into the matter. Uh-huhhhhhhh. This is an example of laissez faire Social Darwinism at its worst. Essentially, the government is telling you that you have four options to deal with Spyware:
How widespread is the Spyware problem? Earthlink did a scan of 1.5 million computers and found an averageof 28 spyware programs on each computer. On top of that, one in three of these computers had a malignant type of software that redirected people's home pages to hard-core porn sites. I know this because I encountered this situation when I used my brother’s computer when visiting him in Vegas. He was bitterly complaining that his computer had been "hijacked." I found out what he meant when I saw that his home page had been redirected to a site that featured photos of what looked like heroin addicts engaging in acts of explicit intercourse. This wouldn’t be such a problem, except my brother has a daughter and son aged 9 and 8 respectively. If they were to jump on the net and open Internet Explorer, they would learn about the facts of life in a manner that could be described as (ahem) "unhealthy," to say the least. Unfortunately, my brother was a relatively new net user and didn’t know how to prevent this. Should he have to deal with this crap? And like I asked before: Should anyone? His case is not unique; there are millions of others in his position.
When the internet first started making inroads to the mass public in the mid 90’s, there was a beautiful purity to it: a cyber-pathway that was a combination on-line library/forum for exchanging experiences and ideas. This original idealism has been corrupted by 10th-rate hucksters and pornographers who are using their "cybertrash" to litter the information superhighway and clog the arteries of computer hard drives everywhere.
Is Congress doing anything about this? There are bills in the House and Senate targeting deceptive Spyware, but good luck on anything happening before the election. And if it seems that the government has been asleep at the wheel, the media is doing an even worse job. Much of my info was gleaned from articles that appeared in newspapers located in such states as Texas, Michigan and Oklahoma. To the best of my knowledge, NONE of the national news magazines or network news broadcasts covered this problem. Yet in the past, they’ve done hundreds of stories on spam and viruses. But if you’ve used the net with any frequency and have half a brain, THESE problems are easy to deal with. The latest versions of internet software and e-mail applications have safeguards BUILT IN to deal with these problems. But what about Spyware? Why is the media ignoring this? This puzzles me.
Okay, I promise to stop ranting about the internet for a while. In my next article, I will jump from the literal horrors of Spyware to some figurative horrors currently on the big screen.
See ya soon.
Steve Finkelstein can be reached at steve@babblog.com.
