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Stopping Spyware

Internet surfers need to worry about more than viruses. Members of the ISP-Tech list find that secret ad servers and other unwanted guests inhabit most computers, but at least these ISP professionals know how to track them down and eliminate them.

[March 26, 2002]

On the ISP-Tech list in March, DD queried,

"I found a file in one of my temp directories that keeps trying to access the Internet, but is being blocked by my firewall. The filename is trickler.exe. Any idea what this is?"

A number of respondents knew all too well what it was:

[LC advised] "Try doing a Google search for trickler.exe. You won't be pleased."

[JM added] "It's spyware. Go to www.lavasoftusa.com, download Ad-aware, and run it. You'll be amazed at what it will find on your system."

[CS agreed] "I loaded Ad-aware on three workstations here, and found seven different spyware entries. Amazing."

JP was astonished at the pervasiveness of the problem:

"You know, there should be a law against this. Actually, I think there is: doesn't this fall under computer intrusion or wiretapping?"

Others observed that, annoying as it may be, it's a well-established practice:

[JT recalled] "I bought one of those 1000-game CDs for $19.95, which turned out to have a similar program on it. In my case, there probably was something about this bot in the setup instructions for the games disk, but I never read the instructions. Still, by buying the disk and installing the setup, I provided implied consent. There certainly ought to be a warning label on the box, though."

[JP added] "We have found spyware on certain versions of PKZIP, RealAudio, and a number of other well-known, commonly used programs. You would be surprised at the people who support this type of junk. The sore spot for me about this is the fact that a well known spyware app causes our software to have problems installing. Our support line gets a lot of calls about it: I'd be afraid to know how many people just delete our software when they run into this issue."

—End