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Raw Bytes Computer News KPBX FM 91.1 Radio National Public Radio Network Frank Delaney Producer Broadcast on Thursday Morning 7:35 AM During Morning Edition Support Public Radio ! The Theater Of the Mind |
In computer news this week
Wednesday, October 21, 2004 |
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The protection you need on the
internet today - Part 3 – or Don’t surf in shark
infested waters ... Spyware is software that installs itself
on your computer without your knowing anything about it, and then can record
anything - from your internet surfing and buying habits, to recording and
stealing your passwords - or banking information. It can then secretly
transmit this data from your computer back to some website which then
collects the data and sells it to advertisers or hackers. I was
reading in the morning paper recently about how a congressional panel has just
passed an anti-spyware bill, but the problem with this is that many of the
websites that install spyware on your computer are not US sites, and our laws
don’t reach them. It’s
just like the anti-spam laws; they just don’t work because the internet
is an international community, and most of the spam hitting your email box
today comes from oversea sites. Related
to the anti-spyware legislation, it was found that more than 60 varieties of
spyware were found to be installed on the panel’s own computers, which
shows how pervasive the current problem is. You can
get infected with a spyware program virtually anywhere on the internet, and
traditional anti-virus programs won’t detect them at all. So you can be
virus-free but still have a spyware program on your computer. So as you go
surfing the web, feeling safe and protected from viruses, the spyware on your
computer is recording everything you do and where you go and sending that
information secretly to some website. Adware technically is a form of spyware,
in that it is installed on your computer also without your knowing anything
about it, and it is very possible – almost probable – to have
both spyware and adware programs installed on your computer at the same time
– but you don’t have a clue. Adware
programs tend to make themselves known to you right away though. The scenario
is that you go to some website, spend some time there innocently looking at
what’s there, and secretly an adware program is downloading itself to
your computer, installing itself without your permission, and is about to
make your internet experience extremely unpleasant.... You leave
the site that infected you with an adware program, and surf on to your next
site. You may see several popup ads at this next site, and you may think
it’s just that site, so you click off it and surf to another site. But
then you start getting pop-ads at that next site too, and you might start
wondering what’s going on. So then
you might surf to another site that you know doesn’t have pop-ads, just
to hopefully return to normalcy, and you find even
more pop-up ads at a site that never before had pop-ads. So now you get
nervous, and decide to go back to your home page, be it google or msn or
whatever, but when you click on the home page icon in your browser,
you’re taken to some strange site you’ve never been before, and
the pop-up ads continue! You see,
this is what’s known as a browser hijacking – an adware program
has taken control of your browser and permanently changed your home page, and
it is written deep into the windows registry and you will never get out of
this nightmare unless you take the proper action. Yet when you run your
anti-virus program, it tells you that everything is fine. Next week
I’ll talk about different ways you can protect yourself from spyware
and adware. .For Raw Bytes This is Frank Delaney (C) 2004 MTA Micro
Technology Associates http://www.mtamicro.com/kpbx.html (509)624-7230 |
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