Ducktoes Spyware Blog

I know that among some people, this suggestion will be a very unpopular, but if your computer is too slow you really ought to remove your free file sharing music and video P2Ps, such as Bearshare, Grokster, etc. If just reading this advice makes you howl and scream on the floor, you might, after you pull yourself together, reconsider. All that free music is filling up your hard drive and making your computer more cluttered than it needs to be, plus it allows other people access to your computer. This traffic uses up resources and slows your computer down. It also degrade your network performance, making going on-line a lengthy process. You can always buy music from iTunes for 99 cents each, which is much cheaper than all the computer maintenance, troubleshooting, and computer hardware will cost you in time and money. Also using legitimate music sources will force you to be more selective and download only songs you really like. How many songs can one person listen to in a lifetime anyway? Paying for downloads gives royalties to your favorite musicians, which might inspire them to record more albums.

Some diehard P2P lovers tell me that the artists only get a small percentage of the money–the corporate record labels get most of it. True. Yet who is going produce albums and promote groups if it is not profitable enough for corporations? Also almost all peer-to-peers have adware and spyware attached to the software downloads. If you think corporations are bad, cyber-criminals are worse. They steal from ordinary people without doing anything positive in return.

Speaking of spyware from filing sharing P2Ps, you’ll need to use a good anti-spyware like Spyware Doctor or Webroots Spy Sweeper to get rid of the mess. Yesterday I removed Grokster from a client’s computer. I had to buy a Spyware Doctor license ($30) for the client. Not only did Spy Doctor find and delete the Grokster application, it also deleted all these all these programs that installed with Grokster: Active Delivery, Casino Outlet, ClipGenie, Commonname, CyDoor, DelfinMedia Viewer, Downloadware, eAcceleration, eUniverse, FavoriteMan, Flashtrack, Gator, IGetNet, IGetNet ClearSearch, Incredifind, IpInsight, Look2Me, Lycos SideSearch, Network Essentials, SC Bar, PeopleOnPage, RVP, Search Enhancement, SearchEnhancement, TOPicks, VX2/e, VX2/f, and WebEnhancer.

That’s a whole heck of alot of c***!! (Of course, that’s caca, lol!!)

To uninstall your P2Ps or any programs, go to Start, then Control Panel, then Add or Remove Programs. Wait for the list to form. Select the name of the P2P you want to uninstall and click remove. After you delete your file sharing program, you’ll need to run your anti-spyware to get rid of the spyware and adware. Spyware and adware do not show up in the Add and Remove Programs tool of the Control Panel, since the creators and promoters of such applications, don’t want you to be able to remove them.
So get rid of the illegal file sharing P2Ps and use iTunes or Napster or other legal music downloader instead.

I’m excited!! I’ve been reading the article on Spyware in Wikipedia. It’s excellent. If you want in depth knowledge about what malware is and does, read it.

The photo on the page shows a browser overloaded with toolbars. If you have unwanted toolbars on your browser window then that is one indication you have spyware. See here how to get rid of it.
Or if you live in Calgary, Ducktoes can help.

Clients and friends (a recent one is my friend Joyce) often ask me three questions, “(1)Just who are these people who spend their time creating malware and spyware?‚Äù And this is usually followed quickly by , ‚Äú(2)Don‚Äôt they have anything better to do?‚Äù and “(3)Why do they do it?” Now, after a recent article in the Calgary Herald by Jan Ravensbergen of Canwest News Sevice, I can give you three more concrete answers.

1. 17 kids from Quebec. 2. Obviously not. 3. For the money.

The 17 kids were from Quebec aged 17 to 25, all male but for one 19-year-old female. They were computer-savvy young adults who took over 1 million computers in 100 different countries. They turned these computers into very, slow unresponsive “zombies” they commanded for their own ends: identity theft, data theft, and fraud. They put the zombies on a botnet, which makes these youthful perpetrators “zombie herders.”

Botnets are big networks of the zombie computers which are herded or commanded to perform various illegal tasks such as sending spam e-mails; collecting and storing private data such credit card numbers, account numbers, and passwords; or serving pornography.

You’ve probably received a phish e-mail purporting to be from Paypal, e-bay, or a bank or other financial institution. If you clicked on a link in the e-mail, it took you to a fake or “phish” website that looked like the real thing, Paypal or a bank etc., but actually, was a phony copycat. If you were unfortunate enough to have typed in your data, it gave whatever you typed such as your user id or account number and passwords to the people running the botnet.

Trojan horses and worms are usually the means to taking over computers, so it is imperative that you run both anti-spyware and anti-virus software on your system. Many people believe they are safe if they run anti-virus software alone, but the zombie herding used by the 17 kids and other computer fraudsters, is mostly carried out with Trojan horses, a form of spyware. So you need the anti-spyware.

Prevention is so much cheaper and easier than reformatting your hard drive and dealing with identity theft and fraud. So don’t wait until its too late, install anti-spyware and anti-virus software today!! If you live in Calgary, Ducktoes can help you do it. Or you can learn how to do it yourself.

Sometimes as techies, we want to keep programs from running at startup. This helps get rid of spyware that is running in memory. Once stopped, we can eliminate malware with Spybot, for instance, without running Spybot again on reboot, which is time-consuming. Also techies often are asked by clients to speed up old computers or new computers running Vista (lol!!), and stopping unwanted programs from running at startup is a good way of doing this. Using msconfig is another way, but problematic since it turns off System Restore, which is another useful tool to return to a computer to more pristine state without reformatting.

Here is a site that tells you how to stop startups by editting the registry. I have found it extremely helpful. However, only edit the registry if you make a backup first, since editing it incorrectly can cause major damage or problems.

This is a link to a video on spyware by C-net Reviews. The editors recommend having more than one anti-spyware. I recommend having all three, Spy-bot, Ad-aware and Windows Defender. They all catch different things.
Here’s a video warning of the dangers of spyware and malware. It’s also an ad for Spyware Doctor, an anti-spyware which works great!! Spyware Doctor’s not free, but definitely worth the price which is about $30-$40.

Here’s another video that explains malware and spyware better. I don’t recommend Spyhunter, but the video is great. In a review of anti-spyware; it gets a mediocre rating. See here.

In this review, Spy Sweeper gets the gold. And SpyWare Doctor comes in fourth. I find both of them excellent tools in the fight against spyware.

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