This thread is purely for informative purposes and you may or may not want to take action based on the information I am about to write.
This morning I logged onto the internet to check my e-mail accounts and received a total of 68 messages (non of which had any attachments). After deleting the obligatory spam (no less than 38 out of the 68) and dealing with the remainder of the messages I spent roughly 25 minutes online. Wishing to disconnect from the ISP I double clicked the systray modem icon and noticed that in the 25 minutes I spent online my computer had mysteriously sent out 1.35MB of info and received 8.56MB of info! :o Now, I can guarantee that I only sent out a handful of e-mails non of which contained any attachments.
This set of alarm bells and it would appear that I had been a victim of so called "spyware" - God knows for how long this had been going on. My PC is shared by two people who independently access the internet for various reasons so it is impossible to pin-point who was the cause of this. Actually, finger pointing is irrelevant as we are all equally exposed when accessing the internet.
I spent some more time online searching for spyware information and came across the following link to download a highly rated "spyware search & destroy" application: http://spybot.eon.net.au/index.php?lang=en&page=download. It is about 3.5MB in size so dowloading didn't take long (even over my antiquated 56K dial-up connection). Installation was painless and modifying the settings was self explanatory. Apart from scanning for spyware this software will also scan your system for dead registry links, usage tracking add-on software and will also help secure your system against certain known future illicit spyware access threats.
Scanning my system took about 15 minutes during which the software checked for 10225 known spyware threads. To my surprise it found no less than 89 threats! Each thread had a very usefull information pop-up link which helped me determine how serious the threat was. Cleaning this mess took about a minute and, fingers crossed, my system should now be clear of nasty spyware.
The moral of this story: I had no idea that I had this many threats on my PC and my guess is that a lot of you don't either. As a preventative measure I highly recommend that you scan your system and protect yourself against this annoying and potentially dangerous form of software. These days identity theft is on the rise and spyware makes it real easy for anyone to gain access to your PC and see/steal personal information. This is especially applicable to those who use their PC's for online banking and internet payments, etc. I understand that installing a personal firewall will help limit this type of uninvited access to your PC but having tested various free firewall software in the past has only resulted in crashed PC systems - don't know why ...
It's a long story but hopefully this information will help those of us who don't even know that they are exposed to this crap.
Hello all,
This thread is purely for informative purposes and you may or may not want to take action based on the information I am about to write.
This morning I logged onto the internet to check my e-mail accounts and received a total of 68 messages (non of which had any attachments). After deleting the obligatory spam (no less than 38 out of the 68) and dealing with the remainder of the messages I spent roughly 25 minutes online. Wishing to disconnect from the ISP I double clicked the systray modem icon and noticed that in the 25 minutes I spent online my computer had mysteriously sent out 1.35MB of info and received 8.56MB of info! :o Now, I can guarantee that I only sent out a handful of e-mails non of which contained any attachments.
This set of alarm bells and it would appear that I had been a victim of so called "spyware" - God knows for how long this had been going on. My PC is shared by two people who independently access the internet for various reasons so it is impossible to pin-point who was the cause of this. Actually, finger pointing is irrelevant as we are all equally exposed when accessing the internet.
I spent some more time online searching for spyware information and came across the following link to download a highly rated "spyware search & destroy" application: http://spybot.eon.net.au/index.php?lang=en&page=download. It is about 3.5MB in size so dowloading didn't take long (even over my antiquated 56K dial-up connection). Installation was painless and modifying the settings was self explanatory. Apart from scanning for spyware this software will also scan your system for dead registry links, usage tracking add-on software and will also help secure your system against certain known future illicit spyware access threats.
Scanning my system took about 15 minutes during which the software checked for 10225 known spyware threads. To my surprise it found no less than 89 threats! Each thread had a very usefull information pop-up link which helped me determine how serious the threat was. Cleaning this mess took about a minute and, fingers crossed, my system should now be clear of nasty spyware.
The moral of this story: I had no idea that I had this many threats on my PC and my guess is that a lot of you don't either. As a preventative measure I highly recommend that you scan your system and protect yourself against this annoying and potentially dangerous form of software. These days identity theft is on the rise and spyware makes it real easy for anyone to gain access to your PC and see/steal personal information. This is especially applicable to those who use their PC's for online banking and internet payments, etc. I understand that installing a personal firewall will help limit this type of uninvited access to your PC but having tested various free firewall software in the past has only resulted in crashed PC systems - don't know why ...
It's a long story but hopefully this information will help those of us who don't even know that they are exposed to this crap.
Regards,