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When spyware crosses the line


NeonWizard
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One of my friends called me in a panic the other day. It seems his 8-year-old daughter was surfing the Internet, searching for Barbie dolls, games designed for children, and other things of interest to 8-year-old girls, when something bad popped up on the screen. She may not have understood what she saw, but she knew it was bad and so she called Mom and Dad.

You can probably guess what popped on the screen. That's right, a page with explicit, graphic pornography. But wait, there's more. It gets worse.

Bookmarks for "mature porn" also popped up all over the computer, placed everywhere from the desktop to the Quick Links toolbar of the browser, to the Favorites area in Internet Explorer -- and these links appeared for all three users who can login to this system. The browser was also redirected, or "hijacked" to display an explicit porn site as the home page, and any attempt to change it back were to no avail. An application also started running secretly in the background, ensuring any attempts to remove these links would be replaced.

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My 50 something Aunt called me the other day with the same problem...

She'd been surfing the 'net with her 9 yr old Grandson and downloaded a football game.

Unfortunately this "game" came with added "extras" such as "Nasty sex" shortcuts everywhere on her PC...And I mean EVERYWHERE with explicit icons!!

Surely we can protect against this filth as Windows users (She was using Windows ME).

I don't use a firewall ATM cause I run a LAN and find the settings a wee bit complicated...Could someone do a tutorial to explain how I can run a Firewall and configure it to allow internet access on the other PC?

Cheers.

Shirl.

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You need to keep Spywareblaster up to date and enable all protection as well.

I keep them ALL up to date and run them as I said alternatively. Occasionally Spybot find something, but Adaware certainly appears to find the most.

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Unfortunatley we are playing a game of cat and mouse, the programs you have mentioned... which are freely available.... are only as good as thier last update. The developers of these programs work flat out to provide you with this protection.... for free..... because they believe that we should not be bombarded with porn or hijacked to sites that we don't want to go. We should have the freedom to go where we want on the internet.

As I said it is a game of cat and mouse, the purveyors of this crap are sneaky and are making it more and more difficult for us to clean and protect against this rubbish.... but we are keeping up with it... we will keep at it with a dogged determination.

All I will ask is that if you use hijackthis, or Coolweb Shredder or Spybot or Spywareguard or any of the others then please do consider a donation... anything that is donated goes towards keeping these applications up to date and effective and keeping you safe. :)

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it is about time they made it an offence to down load anything to a

computer without the owners consent.

The problem is that if these sights are abroad as is almost certain, how do we prosecute?

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it is about time they made it an offence to down load anything to a

computer without the owners consent.

The problem is that if these sights are abroad as is almost certain, how do we prosecute?

yes i understand that but a hell of a lot are european and and american.

and even if the culprits where in china if it linked to a site here or in

america the owners should be done.

this would stop a lot of it.

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I don't know much, but if you use Firefox for example.

would they get on your computer..

Another way, still dumb.

If we can do a look up and find the ISP can we ban that ISP from our server systems, i.e. our Isp's. bt ntl blue yonder.

When they find out we are blocking their access they would soon remove the offending sites, wouldn't they.?

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