Over the weekend I got one of those calls. It was a friend with a computer problem. All my friends seem to have computer problems. Or is it the other way around… all the people I know with computer problems seem to be my friends.
It was the normal “I didn’t do anything”, “it just doesn’t work like it always has” kind of problem. So I had him bring the machine over… along with some snacks (a small price to pay).
When I started a browser, I saw the problem. Pop-up windows all around. They were popping open faster than I could close them. So I suspected spyware.
Spyware is something you can get from just using a browser in a normal way. It’s not necessarily a virus, but a virus can have the properties of spyware. It’s usually some piece of software that gets buried in your browser and will try to take your computer to places on the Internet without asking. A good example is a program that will replace your browser start page with a new page. Many times the new start page will look like a search site or something. The “behind the scenes” part is that the spyware is keeping track of what you are search for and will pop-up windows for advertisers, etc, based on what you enter at the search site.
I did a Google search for
+spyware +freeware
to find something that was free, and found Spybot. I hopped over to Download.com and saw that they rated it five out of five. Based on that, I downloaded it and installed it.
It found 167 pieces of spyware installed on the computer. It removed these and immunized the machine from further attack. Then I ran the update feature of the program and it found the latest version. That version found 22 more pieces of spyware and immunized the machine from a few thousand total spyware programs.
The browser ran noticeably faster, and there were no pop-up windows at all.