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Every 5th Call At Dell Is Spyware-Related
prostoalex writes "Financial Express quotes a Dell executive saying that spyware is installed on roughly 90% computers out there. Right now 20% of all Dell phone support calls are spyware-related. University of Washington research this March published a moderate estimate of 5.1% PCs running spyware."
... and get rid of it if you do...
Spybot Search&Destroy http://spybot.safer-networking.de/
and Ad-Aware http://www.lavasoftusa.com/software/adaware/
BTW, be sure to update the definitions or you're going to miss a lot of spyware.
It didn't answer how many of the computers were infected with any spyware program, just those four.
I run the computer networks for a number of small businesses. We run a variety of programs to keep spyware off the systems. These are less effective than antivirus software.... Approximately 33% of my customers are found to have spyware on a regular basis.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Well as for Mac's -- I don't know if it's part of the culture of the things or what, but there are TONS of mac appps out there that "phone home" to an extent that is generally not tolerated in PC software. A lot of apps even spew network traffic when they start/while they are running to enforce licensing between machines on the LAN. Rather than protest the vendors' applications, though, the community responds as it typically does -- with a ~$10 app named "Little Snitch" that catches this activity. I have never tested it either, but I kind of wonder whether or not "Little Snitch" phones home also...
...I fully concur with that estimation, if not higher.
At least 8 of the 10 computers that I fix follow this routine:
Update and run AV program, if possible.
Install Adaware, update, run.
Install Spybot S&D, update, run.
Run CWShredder.
Fire up a HijackThis! log and manually remove the leftovers.
I'm getting pretty damn good at filtering out the hijackthis logs, too.
Seriously, if you familiarize yourself with spyware removal, you could make a killing on the home PC market. Manufacturers won't help you with spyware. It's getting to the point where the retail chains and PC shops won't deal with it either; they'll simply offer you a format/reinstall.
HALF of the internet connectivity related issues are spyware releated in that it corrupts the TCP/IP stack and Winsock settings in the registry. Also, we had major problems when people installed SP2 on an infected PC with spyware too.
In fact it's so bad. I have the Microsoft KB article 817571 bookmarked and always open on my desktop for when I take calls.
Life is not for the lazy.
The guys who determined it was only 5% only looked for 4 specific pieces of spyware. That means 100% of their computers could be infected with the other 8 billion pieces of spyware out there, but only 5% were gator, ezula, and another two that I can't remember right now, even though I just R'd the FA....
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
You can get a Dell with no OS, and with FreeDOS in the box. Or you can get a Dell Precision with RH pre-installed.
The problem is that Dell hides these little morsels of information so that unless you are already determined to buy a Dell with Red Hat on it you would never know you even had the option.
The very fact that you have been modded informative serves to demonstrate that Dell + RedHat is not an obvious option and most people remain blissfully unaware that it exists.
Dell only offer Linux as an option to appease the Linux crowd. They certainly don't want to be hit by a backlash from the rabid Linux fanboys. But at the same time they are keeping on BillG's good side by sticking "Dell recommends Microsoft® Windows® XP" graphics all over their webstore and ensuring that the Linux option is kept pretty much hidden from the general publics view.
Try going to the Dell website and browsing to a PC with Linux. Don't do a site search for Linux, as that defeats the purpose. Joe Average won't be doing that after all. I just tried looking around for a few minutes. You would think that if you were to check out the "Learn more about operating systems" links on most of their store pages you might see a mention of the Linux option?. No, there is no mention of Linux in there, just descriptions of XP Home vs XP Professional. Yay! It's as if Linux doesn't even exist.
Dell might technically sell you Linux if you ask for it, but they sure go out of their way to make sure you don't ask about it.
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
I use my firewall as a snitch. Not only do plenty of apps phone home but so many of them that do still work perfectly well despite being blockaded from the internet. I do however get quite annoyed by applications that you configure to not use the internet that then still go ahead and try to access the internet.
Time Warner in Austin will disable your modem remotely if the system detects port scanning from the device connected to it (PC, Router...)
I ran into an issue once where this customer had a repeated history of service abuse. The issue of course was a virus. It was logged over and over in her customer log that she formatted and reinstalled the PC with her Dell restoration disks (dell walked her through the process). So when it came to my attention with the customer called in for the 4th bloody time, I asked her if she was using a wireless router. She said "Ya, I have a blue Linksys wireless"
Well folks, she learned a valuble lesson to never leave a wireless router unprotected at an appartment near the UT campus. Obviously someone else decided to leach off her connection and blow infected viri down her modem, hence SHE got blame for it.
Life is not for the lazy.
Wrong. I see this allegation all the time from people who never use the system in question, but OS X has this wonderful notion that you ought to consent to software being installed on your system. Even as administrator, there are some things you just can't do without authenticating (usually through a password dialog), and one of those is installing any software that uses a program to place it instead the old drag-and-drop method. If you want software to be put onto the system, you have to do it and that's all there is to it.
In order for spyware to work on OS X, it's going to have to be trojanized. There's not much you can do about the human factor, other than running as non-administrator, but that's a FAR smaller deal than it is for Windows.
Oh, and you prove your ignorance by comparing administrator status with root. There is no default root account on OS X, though you can enable it through NetInfo if you really get tired of using sudo. Why you'd do so, I can barely imagine, but there you go. Administrators are more priveleged than other users, but they're hardly root.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. -Arthur C. Clarke
Most, if not all, of the Win32 firewalls block based on the program name and location. If coolapp.exe tries to access the internet, it can't. It can try all the ports it wants; it won't get through.
Some of the better ones even recognise \myapp\iexplorer.exe as being different than \yourapp\iexplorer.exe. Even if someone tried to write an app named the same as one allowed to access the internet, they still couldn't get through.
I am worried, however, about an app using system calls to route itself through explorer.exe without actually launching it.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.