Spyware

Service with a Sword and a Smile
Donator V3.0
painthappens's picture
Location: At work... way too often!

I just cleaned one of the PCs here in the office and it had exactly 956 pieces of spyware... Jesus where the hell were they going? SpywareRUs.com ?

WOW: Bounce

Just one more turn!
Donator V2.0
Location: Wherever I want to be.

Ha! I''ve finally been forced to put Norton Professional Suite on all of our office computers, due to ""bad"" surfing....as part of the process, I also installed Spybot Search & Destroy & Spysweeper....unbelievable how much crap gets sucked in by IE when you''re surfing (especially to ""bad"" sites)....

I''ve been so happy with FireFox (now 1.0)- recommended by some of you- that I might officially switch our entire PC force to it.

Paint- you might try Norton....

"Eat Keel, Hellbug!"

Head Coach
*Legion*'s picture
Location: Monterey County

I work in the advising offices of the local university, and many of them had spyware on that order when I first started working here.

Frankly, all they did was surf around in Internet Explorer, and download and install a couple things. Sometimes not even the latter.

IE simply should not be used, period. It offers no true advantages and massive drawbacks. It''s amazing what bad software people will put up with solely because it says ""Microsoft"" on there.

Gaming / PC Tech Blog: www.blastprocessing.net
Xbox Live: Legion SB | PSN: Legion_SB

Stop whatever crap you're playing and join us in SOCOM.

Europeon
Spunior's picture

I also recommend running Crap Cleaner once in a while. Not an Ad-Ware detector, but helpful for getting rid of junk you probably don''t need anymore. Also cleans the registry. Remember to unmark the IE or Firefox cookies etc. if you''d like to keep these settings.

Coffee Grinder
Location: Under something heavy

"painthappens wrote:
it had exactly 956 pieces of spyware...

Almost matches my record. I cleaned a computer for someone who said their computer wouldn''t stay on for more than 2 minutes. Booted it up, started IE and bam! So many pop ups the system ran out of memory and crashed. Ran Ad-Aware and found over 14,000 objects.

Funniest part was they had so many toolbars and search bars installed on IE that they took up 3/4 of the IE window. Some people should just put the computer down and step away...

"Shop smart. Shop S Mart!"
-- Ash, Housewares

Executive
Fanatka's picture
Location: Irvine, CA

I''ve basically had to force Firefox usage on all machines here at the office. I remove all IE desktop icons in the process. We''ve been using Thunderbird for a mail client as well, and things have been *much* better since.

Using IE is like unprotected sex. Sure, it''s convenient and less of a hassle than the alternative, but the consequences can be deadly.

-Fan

Office Linebacker
Brannil's picture

Quote:
Using IE is like unprotected sex. Sure, it''s convenient and less of a hassle than the alternative, but the consequences can be deadly.

ROFL!!

my record here is over 1200 objects. But I think there''s something really bad going around because in the last week the network guy has seen 5 computers in the company try to SEND OUT spyware.. ugh!
At least it''s all job security for me. =)