Spyware

I am a geek. Yes, a professional geek. I learned long ago, in another life, so to speak, that to be considered a professional at anything, at least half of your income must come from the work you do in your chosen profession. So for instance, if you say you are a professional photographer, at least half of your income must come from photography to be considered a professional. Therefore, I am a professional geek. I work on computers. All kinds. From the common home desktop box to Unix servers. I pretty much do it all, and currently almost all of my income comes from computers.

The current bane of computer work is what is commonly called spyware. Also, it is known as malware, adware, popup ads, etc. These little programs that seemingly come out of thin air to infect and weave their way into the deep recesses of your computer that perform a variety of functions, from stealing your credit card numbers, to delivering tailored ads directly to your desktop, in hopes you will buy the products being offered. Basically, they are just a pain in the ass. The only real function they serve is to slow down your computer to a crawl and make the entire experience of computing so frustrating that many give up on the whole thing entirely. This is a shame. I find computers both fun and functional. After all, they do allow me to pay most of my bills, somewhat on time.

Admittedly, I have a love/hate relationship with spyware. Currently, I am making some pretty decent money from cleaning up computers for people who are severly infected by this crap. Were it not for the near epidemic spread of this stuff, I wouldn't be able to afford some of the luxuries I currently enjoy. But I also think this type of stuff should be contained in some way. I really have no clue as to how to stop this stuff. The programmers who are writing these programs are some of the best I've seen. Nowdays, you don't even have to know you are installing this stuff. It can come from what I call "drive by web sites", where you are surfing around, hit some web site from random surfing, and the next thing you know, WHAM, you are suddenly loaded with spyware, without ever having to click a "yes" I want to install this to enhance my experience, or whatever. Pretty sneaky stuff.

And even more frustrating is the spyware that installs just to direct you to their site so that you can pay to use their spyware removal tool to uninstall what THEY INSTALLED in the first place! Man, that is just evil. I currently have about four tools in my bag of tricks to remove most of the spyware currently on the market, and I have to constantly update the definition files to combat all of the new stuff that comes out almost daily. There is spyware out there now that sits in memory looking for the same tools I use and it kills the removal tools before they can even get started. Spyware killer killers, if you will.

I don't know what the answer is, and all I can do is continue to battle the beast. And yes, what got me thinking about all of this today, is that my own system got hit with a flood this morning. My fault completely. I was barely awake when I hit a site that I ... well... I made a dumbass move and actually installed something I shouldn't have. WHAM! I knew it immediately. So for the next 45 mintues, I was doing deep registry scans of my system and removing the 350 pieces of spyware I was able to infect myself with in a mere 3 minutes. Amazing.

Fortunately, I am skilled enough to take care of this. There are a lot of people out there who are not. They will either find a "friend who knows computers" to help them out, hire someone like me to take care of it for them, or just live with the garbage and hope for the best. That latter group will often get so frustrated with the popups and slow systems they fall out of favor with computing as a whole, and that is really sad. I wish all of you out there the best of luck, but I can tell you from doing this day after day, you are probably already infected. And it's only going to get worse in the near future.

Gone.
LoRyder