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On the Prevalence and Removal of Spyware?
oo7tushar asks: "There's a lot of spyware out there these days. As a Windows/Linux user I'm concerned about what spyware is installed on my machines and I'm very concerned about this issue when it comes to Windows. A few questions for the masses: What are the most common spying applications that are installed? How do I get rid of them without getting rid of the parent application? Have you encountered spyware on Linux?"
Yes. End of story. Move along people.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
and most of everything that tries to connect over non standard port will be stoped
:) Plus, now you need a community-contributed and -distributed blackout list (of known spyware URLs), and at that point, you might just as well be using AdAware.
Yeah, but if you were writing a spy-ware program, would you use a non-standard port to send it out?
I'd just send it over HTTP on port 80. Or better yet, HTTPS on 443, so no content-sniffing could be done on it. Would you be willing to stop all web browsing traffic leaving your home/site/corporation?
The only way, then, to stop this would be to block traffic to particular sites, but if the traffic goes to microsoft.com, you're hosed 'cause you *need* to go there at least monthly to fix whatever's currently broken.
If these programs aren't already doing this, then they're even dumber than I thought. Unless *I* am dumber than I thought (and I admit I can be pretty stupid at times) and I've missed something obvious here.
Dude, I don't know about you, but the last thing I would want to have on my machine when the Feds came and served a no-knock warrant at 3 AM is a program listed in Add/Remove programs called "Evidence Eliminator"--that alone would be enough to intimidate someone into copping a plea. Imagine the prosecutor telling about it to the jury: "The defendant, an obvious hacker|child molestor|software pirate|cracker, covered his tracks using this program (insert description of what it does." Instant conviction.
Someone needs to reverse-engineer the protocols used by these programs and start shoving gigabytes of bogus data down their throats.
In short order they'll either cut your IP range off, in which case you've done a fine service for your ISP's fellow customers, or they'll start aggregating clearly bogus data which will decrease its marketability to their clients.
Are they going to take you to court and say "Your honor, we were secretly spying on this person and he's started lying to us about what he was doing online..."?
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS