Ducktoes Spyware Blog

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.

Pornography can be an addiction. It is also a multi-billion dollar big business. Pornographers are always trying to find new recruits online. Hoping to suck in more and more customers, they use adware, spyware, and malware to serve pornography to unsuspecting computer users and entice them into their expensive boudoir. One way they do this is called cyber-squatting. According to Jerry Rupelato in his article “Tricks Pornographers Play” pornographers purchase domain names that sound like legitimate sites offering information about various topics. You think you are going to a site to learn about hotels in Germany, for instance, and instead find–you guessed it–graphic pornography. A well-known example of this, according to Rupelato, is whitehouse.com. I remember this example from my days as an Educational Computer Strategist in Clark County School District. Teachers who told their students to research for facts about the President or executive branch of government would be shocked to find the kids had found pornography instead. This didn’t happen in the school’s computer labs because Clark County had strong, effective filters. But it did happen at home. Parents can also purchase filters for their home computers. Click on the above link to find recommended ones. If you are in Calgary or it environs and unsure of how to download, set up, and install a filter, Ducktoes can help. We can come to your home or business. Click here to go to Ducktoes.

A couple of months ago, I came across a pornography netbot. It was exciting–and scary–to see. Right here in Calgary a computer on was on an illegal botnet. Without my client’s knowledge or permission, her computer had turned into a zombie. It was serving pornography to the netbot’s customers at the expense of my client. As a zombie, her unresponsive and super slow computer was useless to her. It was part of a netbot, a group of computers networked together for an illicit purpose, in this case to serve porn photos. The computer was so tortuously slow it was taking more than ten minutes to get on the internet or use other programs. The client hired me to help. She didn’t know what was going on except that her computer was full of junk. She was a very nice and interesting woman, a Calgary entrepreneur and artist, and a victim of some not-so-nice online criminals.

This happened because of malware. An stealth-installed program had compromised the computer’s security. The computer file sharing was turned on. All the computer’s resources were being used up with the botnet’s processes. A shared folder had .zip files that were full of porn. They had names like hotbabelick.zip. The virus software had been rendered ineffective. The anti-spyware I used also didn’t work well at first. I tried to turn off the processes in Windows Task Manager but an error message popped up saying I didn’t have the authority to stop the process.

I did manage to stop enough processes to allow the virus software to start working. By the time I left, the computer was much faster. And after I left the client told me that Spybot and Ad-Aware had removed the botnet programs.

What works best in a case like this, is to take the computer’s hard drive out and attach it to a computer in my lab and run the virus and spyware removal programs without the operating system which is repressing the virus and spyware programs.

If you have spyware or malware, I can help. Call (403) 287-0105.