Slashdot Mirror
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."
I think it's probably somewhere in between 5% and 90%...
According to Dell, 90% of the computers out there have spyware installed on them... the other 10% are Macs and machines running *NIX. :-P
This is Dell(hi). We are not able to being helping you with Spyware this time. Your Dell service is not including that. Do not be cursing at me, sir! Your attitude is having me upset! You must be finding a local person to be helping you.
Or they would if this were really a problem for them. Makes one wonder.
From the article Spyware-related phone calls now make up as much as 20 percent of all help calls, compared with just 1 percent to 2 percent in August, 2003
Is this because users are now more aware of the existance of spyware, rather than the actual 19% increase?
For instance, in 2003, Joe-granpa probably didn't know/care why his modem's blinking non-stop, but he does now.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
... 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.
They really went the distance to get the results they wanted...
Techs should feel lucky there's yet another thing out there creating a job market for them, whether they're still based in the USA, or shipped off to another country. You know, I thought Dell had the worst Dell tech support for sure, but I had to call Dlink last week to clarify on something, and I got into an argument from India about what was written on the configuration page of a cheap office router. It's up in the air -- The Dell tech couldn't read, and the Dlink tech said what I was reading was not possible. Hrm.
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
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
Where are the antivirus companies? This shit has gotten to a bigger problem than virii ever were and behaves in much the same way. Still, your fancy $70 "internet security" package won't touch it.
Only in a Slashdot fantasy can a Slackware install turn into several hours of sex . . . . .
read the prompt with incredulity and then apply their best judgment
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!
I wouldn't trust the average user to make toast without burning down the house.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Most schools don't trust their educated college students with electric cooking elements. Think about it...
Funny thing, I read that article and a popup for spyware comes up, defying even Firefox's popup blocker. Ironically, the popup said that the computer has spyware installed.
Eh.
I wonder if this policy is still in effect ("Dell To Techs: Don't Help Customers Remove Spyware").
By the way, I love the "Your browser has blocked a popup" image over the article text. Really helps in the journalistic integrity department.
...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.
because you can't pawn your tough cases onto Microsoft. A typical OEM support call follows 3 stages: 1) clean boot 2) run Adaware 3) sorry, run your restore CDs or call Microsoft. Plus, there are _tons_ of tricks to getting free tech support from Microsoft, and many OEM techs are happy to let you know what to say/do.
Oh, and if your customers buy new hardware and it doesn't work, you can't pawn them off on the manufacturer (no Linux support, you see). Yeah, hardware Dell didn't sell you isn't supported. Try telling that to the average jerk who just bought a $30 dollar digital Camera. He's not gonna care if you support it or not, and he's just gonna get pissed and buy a Windows PC next time.
You're underestimating the value that $50 bucks buys an OEM.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
But avoiding spyware on the whole is very simple, and comes down to a few simple steps, based on prevention is better than cure, i.e. it's better not to get something bad at all, than to get something bad and then have to get rid of it.
Make sure their computers are behind some kind of hardware or software firewall which blocks all incoming TCP connection requests. Yes, there is more to it, but this one step is a huge improvement on not having a firewall.
Install another browser such as Mozilla Firefox, and show them how to use it. Only use Internet Explorer for specific sites that you trust, if it has to be used at all. Remember that many users need Flash and Java, so consider installing these as well to stop them going back to IE as soon as they hit a site requiring one or the other.
Spend a few minutes educating your users about malicious software. Explain that a computer simply follows instructions with little concept of good or bad, and that it only takes a double click on one file containing such instructions (eg a .exe file) to contaminate the system.
Yes, there's more: software updates, strong passwords, encryption, using more secure software and all the rest of it. Unfortunately most of our users aren't interested in becoming computer security experts. If you can get those three above points hammered in, and let them know that that there is more to securing their computer, you're making a big step in the right direction.
Suppose you are driving home from work one night and you happen to drive through an ion storm.
You pull up in your drive way and everything seems normal. But then you walk in the house and see a hot girl sitting on your couch. She walks over and gives you a passionate kiss and tells you dinner is ready. You know something is seriously wrong the universe.
In this parallel world, *your* favorite Linux distribution is King. As is your favorite Window Manager, toolkit, and so on. 90% of the world runs it.
Now my question is - what would prevent spyware authors from writing and sucessfully deploying spyware on your Operating System?
Lets make the assumption that people in this parallel universe are just as careless as they are in the real universe.
When I was a Dell tech, we had to refer to spyware as "third-party software" and we were not authorized to recommend tools for removal. Of course, I would just tell them to run spybot and pray for rain, but if a supervisor would have caught me doing that I'd've likely been fired.
What the hell do they expect to happen, when they won't let the techs solve the problem?
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
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.
See this forum discussion on BroadbandReports. On my office Dell Dimension 8250, its support program (support.exe) phones home. I consider this a spyware.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
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.
I have been using DOS then Windows since 1984 and have never had spyware or a virus either. In fact I don't even run checkers constantly, just every few weeks to double check. (And for the record I have been doing Linux since late 1991 and not had anything there either).
If you are prepared to put the time and effort into it, it is all pretty easy. You don't blindly run or view stuff from other sources, you don't steal software (if you don't have the originals then you have no idea what you are actually getting), you pay attention to the dialog boxes that various programs display etc. Heck I even read the contents of those dialog boxes with legal agreements in them before clicking Ok or Cancel. Most people just don't do that, and as a result their computers end up with more "helpful" software than they otherwise anticipated.
To say that Linux by design is invulnerable is nonsense. It doesn't take too much to infect an individual user (remember they aren't reading those dialog boxes either). And notice how on many Linuxen, when you try to run an admin tool on your ordinary user desktop, prompt for your (sudo) or the root password and which then leaves a key icon in your panel. That is one thing that can be abused to go from ordinary user to root. In many cases a piece of malware could probably just prompt and the average user would type in the necessary password.
Quite frankly I don't know the answer. Signing stuff doesn't work. User education is futile - why should someone have to know about the internals of their computer, operating system, access and authorisation models? It probably comes down the programmers and user interface. Every time the software has to ask a question, it is being stupid. We need to continually work on the software meeting the user's goals without needing to be babysat, and especially without them having to make these decisions all the time.
I work at my school (Cornell Univ.) in the Information Technologies department taking calls and basically doing technical support for folks who don't know anything about computers. Our ratio of spyware questions to any other questions is definitely at LEAST 4:1. It gets real old, real fast. Thing is, we're not allowed to give advice on what spyware removal tools to use, which makes it that much harder. The problem never gets fixed, and we just get more and more repeat calls.
I'd venture to say that most non-tech savvy computers have some sort of spyware/adware installed. Why do these people get it?
1) They accidently click on something they didn't mean to, because of a popup. It goes downhill from there, since many spyware programs act like virii and have some friends join the fray.
2) Users that hit porn sites. These are the black hole of spyware, and while I've told them "stop looking at the porn and you wont get this crap", and they say they don't, yet I see their Internet Explorer history and its just filled with porn urls.
While my parents are largely #1, I've switched them to firefox and its gone down dramatically. I still catch them using IE for things like OWA and a few other IE-sites (and they will re-use the browser window to do other things).
I simply got tired of deal with them calling me about "CoolWebSearch" and tons of other junk that pisses me off.
I use Internet Explorer *and* firefox to browse the web, and I never get *any* spyware - I just know what to look out for. I'd say at least 80% of the people out there don't.
It also helps if you surf the web as a non-priveldged account - those are, for the most part, invulnerable to spyware. Just as none of you would use any web browser on linux as root -
agressiv
A worm outbreak today is an acute disorder -- the bulk of the damage is done in one day, even a handful of hours or minutes. Even though recovering a business or department from it can take longer, the outbreak itself burns through the vulnerable population pretty quickly, and starves itself. Spyware, because it's rooted in long-standing bad security practices both by Microsoft and by Windows users, is a chronic disorder -- it doesn't just shut you down for a day or so; it degrades your online life over a long, nasty time.
To extend the analogy perhaps too far: A flash worm is like Ebola: it kills its victims quickly and messily and leaves a disgusting corpse. Everyone knows when it's in town because of the gory sacks of flesh lying around the streets. Spyware is like cirrhosis of the liver. It comes from doing something bad over a long period of time. It doesn't spread to others materially, though long-term excessive drinking (which causes it) can "spread" memetically in a population, as do bad Windows security practices. And, eventually, it causes the affected organ to be overwhelmed and just shut down.
The spyware situation today is one created by a nexus of influences:
The first two are well-known and I will not address them further. The latter are not.
What I call contract date-rape is the evil represented by so-called "end-user license agreements" and other documents which purport to represent agreements between software publishers and computer owners. The unethical business practice of software publishers is as follows: The computer owner buys a piece of software and installs it, only to find that it is designed so that it cannot be run without "accepting" an "agreement" which waives the owner's rights -- such as resale rights, rights to a refund for defective merchandise, or even free-speech rights. Then, when the software does something harmful and the owner seeks recourse, he is told that he "consented" to whatever harm was done, simply by the act of using what he purchased.
It is contract date-rape which puts the lie to that old FUD about open-source software: "But whom do you sue when it breaks and doesn't get fixed?" The owner of a computer using proprietary software under a Microsoft-style EULA does not have any enforceable rights against the publisher. Windows does break in many ways that Microsoft doesn't fix, but nobody is suing Microsoft for it. Why? Whether the EULA is in fact legally binding or not, both Microsoft and computer owners regard it as leaving Microsoft with no obligations.
(Of course, software was not always sold on "as-is" terms that were intended in law for used and defective products. Nor was it sold on terms that used copyright law as a cudgel with which to deprive users of rights such as fair comment and resale. Contract date-rape is not an endemic problem of proprietary software; it is one that proprietary software publishers have chosen for themselves.)
And it is the methodical use of contract date-rape which leads to the situation we have with spyware today. Spyware gets into a computer owner's property unannounced, alongside some piece of (presumably) desired software. It is a Trojan horse in the original sense -- sooner or later, it bursts open and out pour the soldiers of the enemy, who go about merrily burning w
I find it ironic that half of the stuff that Dell ships on their prebuilt computers makes computers run ust as slow as a lot of spyware. I know that when clients of mine buy a new Dell computer, they're disappointed at how slow it runs. Reformatting the HD always makes the computer run 10 times+ faster.
The spyware situation today is one created by a nexus of influences:
I can't argue with 3) or 4). But as for 1) [and it touches a little on 2)], we've been running Windows NT & Windows 2000 for more than five years now, and we've NEVER had a SINGLE piece of spyware installed on any of our systems. [Never had a virus or a worm either, although I hope I didn't just jinx myself by saying that.]
You know why? BECAUSE NONE OF OUR END-USERS LOG ON AS ADMINISTRATORS!!! That's it - it's that simple. They don't have Administrative rights, and they can't install spyware [or viruses, or worms]. [Of course, yours truly installs the latest security patches as soon as they appear, and has always had all of his users behind a fire wall, but that's not the important point here.]
If you surf the web as an Administrator [Root] on OSX, or if you surf the web as an Administrator [Root] on Linux, you're every bit as prone to this stuff as any Microsoft user surfing the web as an Administrator [or you would be, if those operating systems had large enough market share for the spyware people to be bothered with writing spyware for them].
Well, nice to see it coming around to byte you, eh, Dell?
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
There's someone who does an organized scan of my ISP's IP space every morning at 8:42 and 9:42 EDT. When I have two DHCP IPs, both get hit with an average of eight bots each trying ports 5554, 1023, 9898 and 445. The IPs it comes from are usually Korean or Japanese. When I listen at the ports, they try various exploits on bots which do listen on those ports to download their own bot software.
I suspect that "8:42 Zombie Charlie" scans a lot more than my ISP's space. So it looks like someone is running a very organized and *punctual* effort to harvest a whole lot of botted machines for unknown purposes. Joy. (Actually, it's kind of fun. I wrote a sound effects program from my firewall, and I drink my coffee listening to the chorus of sounds as the ports are checked. Too bad I can't arrange to be checked a little earlier in the morning.)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
I tried to set my friends up that way. It isn't hard, XP comes with that ability, even in the home version. Setting up is easy enough. Making it work is another matter though. Nearly half of the programs my friends want to run do not work correctly without administrator rights. This includes software for XP from Microsoft!
In the end I gave up, ideally they wouldn't use the administrator account except when needed, but practically their computer didn't work without it. Switching users takes time and is a pain. Not hard, and it doesn't take long, but annoying enough that I can't call it a solution.
Remember this is a home environment, not a work environment. They don't have someone checking out software from various competitors to see if it meets requirements. If Best Buy sells it they buy it, and expect it to work. (note that you can almost never return software after finding out that it doesn't work without administrator rights)
I know many people who replace their computers every two years "because the old one got really slow". These people aren't searching for large prime numbers, finding pi to the 50,000th digit, or running nuclear blast simulations - they are checking email, surfing the web, and burning CDs. What drives this pointless upgrade cycle?
You guessed it: Spyware.
Why would Dell want to fix the problems? Their solution often times is to tell the hapless user that their machine is toast, and that they should buy a new one.
-ted
Once installed an extension can do anything the user can do. Normally that might be to stick a button onto the browser, but there's nothing to stop the extension searching your drive and uploading data, acting as spyware or installing a root kit etc.
Just like ActiveX, XPI files are meant to be signed so you can establish trust. But no one digitally signs their Firefox extensions! Therefore users are 'trained' to install untrusted XPI extensions. Untrusted means you have no idea who wrote it, or if it's been tampered with.
Firefox 1.0pr1 has introduced a small band-aid. Now have to indicate you 'trust' a site before you can install an XPI from it. It's better than nothing but it still won't authenticate or repudiate the XPI as being from that site - someone could have replaced the genuine XPI with a malicious one, or intercepted the entire site entirely.
The XPI model either needs to enforce certs and give contributors a way to get them conveniently and cheaply. Or it should move over to PGP signatures and a web of trust model. In some ways the latter is more beneficial since people don't have to fork out ludicrous sums to Verisign to authenticate that they wrote the extension.
In any case, I'm just indicating that a naive user could install something on Linux that they would later regret.
"This just goes to show what security folks who have to deal with ordinary, average users have been saying for quite some time now: spyware is the #1 security problem for the ordinary Windows user today. Break-ins, worms, and viruses are all nasty problems indeed, but they do not cause the level of sheer aggravation and suffering that spyware does."
/. article claiming 1 out 5 children were solicitated in various forms on the internet last year, but I'm pretty sure I wasn't able to get throught to her about the dangers of the predatory social engineering that can take place through the internet these days. Spyware has the potential to pose a much bigger risk than most people believe because it opens the door to rootkits, social engineering, etc. when it is allowed to run amok in this manner.
I absolutely agree with you that spyware is without doubt the most grevious problem afflicting home Windows user today. However, it is not only the shear numbers of spyware and lack of unified solution to these problems that makes spyware the critical problem it is, but the threat and damage that can be caused by spyware, in my opinion far exceeds what I would consider aggrevation.
Although I am a fulltime workstation administrator for a tech company and often times pick up home user workstation support on the side and they are almost always problems related to spyware. I recently agreed to work on a women's computer that was no longer able to connect to the internet as well as set up a home wireless network for her. She told me that it was "her daughters toy and as long as she can get connected to the internet and chat at night it keeps her daughter out of her hair" they both remain happy. The daughter is 13 years old and has taken to chatting with her friends at night, passing around links to salacious little horoscope programs, gossip programs, ad nauseum . . . After two hours of working on the computer I had removed over 500 instances of spyware (files, reg keys, programs, etc NOT INCLUDING COOKIES!). My obvious diagnosis was that Windows XP home needed to be reloaded but for now she could get back on the internet. When I returned a week later after recovery disks had been obtained there was even more spyware than before & a mysterious bridged internet connection that I assumed was being used to turn the machine into a slave for God knows what. Additionally, I found approx. 5000 illegal song downloads (automatic prison time there), limewire and kazaa and an AIM add-on that was keeping documented records of all IM conversations. I quickly learned that this could not possibly have been the daughters choice as the one converstation I opened while investigating revealed explicit discussion of sexual activities. To me, the potential for abuse in this case goes far beyond the loss of data, or even identity theft. A hacker with access to this machine would be able to know all of this girls personal information, name, address, appearance, school schedule and what place her volleyball team achieved at districts. Needless to say, I did my very best to try to educate this women about the dangers of these surfing habits even referencing the recent
I've been looking into ways to remove the profit incentive from the spyware guys. These morally challenged cruds monitor your web browsing habits and then sell that info. What if that info was full of bad entries? Like increasing the junk to valid signal ratio?
What I envision is a screen saver that we load on all the machines we can get our hands on. This screen saver then contacts these spyware sites and uploads random info. The aggressiveness could be controlled by the user, allowing it not to flood any Internet connection. The screen saver could have spyware lists, just like anti-virus software that could be updated. Imagine having millions of pcs uploading junk to coolwebsearch. How long would you say these guys would stay in business? Would those that are buying this info continue to do so even if it full of garbage?
Obviously this would be OSS, but we could license it in such a way as to allow folks like Dell to preload this and set it as default.
So folks, what do you think? Is this the way to kill these guys or is the recent criminalization enough to stem the tide?
Quit playing Monopoly with Bill.
Linux - of the people, by the people, and for the people.