What
is SpyWare? How did I get infected? How do I get rid of it?
SpyWare is an information gathering tool commonly used by marketing
companies. By downloading a report generator tag to your machine they
are
able to generate a profile of your web activity or even a log of what
you do
on the web. In fact this may sometimes be a malicious invasion of your
privacy and for the business, professional or government office may
constitute an invasion of privacy. This report generator tag will
periodically respond to queries from it's home site. Supposedly these
reports are not user specific. Should you collect a lot of these their
reporting activities can at times significantly interfere with your
resources. On occasion they may cause your machine to lock up or become
sluggish or seem unresponsive. Please understand anti-virus software
such as
McAfee or Norton will not detect SpyWare.
Simply going to certain websites is enough to infect your machine.
There is
a tool however which gives you relief from this pesky
invader. Go to
www.download.com,
search for Ad-aware, download and install that program.
Then place a shortcut to Ad-aware in your startup folder.
NOTE: Copy the shortcut to the windows clipboard. To find
your startup
folder in Windows Explorer select your C drive and left click, select
search
or find, in the text box type startup. Now paste the shortcut to that
folder. Ad-aware will now run on startup.
Simply follow the instructions you may be horrified! Some of
our customers
have reported more than 100 instances of SpyWare!
After running Ad Aware and clearing your machine go to
www.doubleclick.com
Do nothing just exit the site. Now run Ad Aware again. You'll see
you've been infected simply by going to the site. You never know what
baggage will be dumped on you by a site. We're all in doubt and we're
all better off packing a big gun like Ad Aware.
Bill McCaslin
Dir. Technical Support
Document Imaging Solutions
http://documentimage.com