pri-va-ate eyes (clap clap) are watching you

december 20, 2004 @ 23:54

My laptop has been acting a little flaky lately. My copy of Word will occasionally hang while opening a document, the taskbar will suddenly lose all the little 'open program' tabs, etc, etc. I kinda half-believe that since it's been 18-months since it was last rebuilt that it's probably just overdue for a deep clean, but I also kinda half-believe that Windows XP is pretty solid and that I shouldn't really be having any problems.

I mentioned my troubles to a guy at work today and he casually tossed out that it was probably spyware causing the instabilities. "Gufuh?!" I said. "Yep," he said, "I bet that's it."

But wait. I'm no idiot. I don't click banner ads, I don't download random software, I keep my privacy settings tweaked to only allow the bare minimum of data to squeak into/out of my system. How could I have spyware? He's gotta be wrong.

But paranoia and fear got the best of me so tonight I downloaded AdAware SE and cranked up the full disk scan. And WHAM! like 2 minutes in it had already identified 52 'critical' files on my machine. WTF?! How could that be? What are they? Tell me tell me tell me!

But it doesn't tell me, it has to finish the scan first. Which, when you have a computer burdened with a palette of hefty development programs and a lifetime worth of code, takes like 3 effing hours to complete. I had half a million files. Gross. I actually got so bored I stopped worrying about whatever critical crap it found and came to be at peace with the world. It was very cathartic.

In the end it turned out that I just had a bunch of pseudo-spyware cookies in my IE cache. I don't use IE for my daily browser, so I never bothered to set-up any type of security on it. I must have inadvertently fired it up and picked up some trashware cookie data while browsing yahoo or something. (Pre XPSP1 IE security: totes stupes.) Either way, some lamer cookies hardly constitute a 'critical' spyware invasion. They gotta get some new levels or something. Like maybe 'warning' or 'info' maybe.

So conclusions: AdAware - cries wolf, but still pretty neat; laptop - needs a rebuild, but it can probably wait a while.

AdAware [lavasoft] - free as in beer
Firefox [mozilla] - free as in beer
Firefox AdBlocking [mozilla] mint as in beer

[comments]

  1. click thought:

    hey dave, ever try "Spybot Search and Destroy"? I've found that running AdAware alone doesn't always get everything.

  2. dave thought:

    no i haven't, but to be honest i'd never run any of the anti-crapware programs on my machine before last night. and even after all the c-net reviews and millions of downloads, i still don't even trust that the 'good' programs aren't just spyware themselves. i yanked my nic card and ran ethereal as it scanned, just to be sure it wasn't just dumping my info back to the mothership. yes, i think i need help.

    anyway, thanks for the tip. i'll give it a look.

  3. Red thought:

    Aunt RedAware:
    So one time when I was at your house babysitting during the olympics I used IE to find Greekilicious recipes online and then ordered the ingredients on Simon delivers.
    So maybe a critical cookie or two were mine.
    oops.
    It would have been funnier if you found a Trojan horse. because they were greek recipes..HA!

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