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Spyware on One in Twenty Computers?

Posted by michael on from the PEBKAC dept.

SpaceDonkey writes "New Scientist reports that researchers at the University of Washington carried out a scan of the campus network for signs of spyware. They found spyware lurking on more than one in 20 machines and also discovered a serious vulnerability in two of the four spyware programs they looked for."

3 of 400 comments (clear)

  1. Ad-Aware by amembleton · · Score: 5, Informative

    Download yourself a free copy of Ad-Aware from here. I ran it on my computer the other day and it found 22 infected files, that it cleaned up for me :)

  2. That seems like a low percentage by Lotek · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'm a tech for a medium sized publishing company, and I find that the first thing I do when I get complaints of slowness and random unexplained crashes is to run spybot. In roughly half of the systems I check, I can find some kind of spyware.

  3. Effective combination... by Fez · · Score: 5, Informative
    I work at a computer repair shop, and nearly every single computer I work on has some degree of spyware. The best combination of tactics to kill spyware that I've found is as follows (All in Safe Mode, of course):

    There's not a lot to be missed after that. Process Explorer is also good for finding processes running that might not be of obvious origin.