Computer Parasites Getting Nasty
I picked up another drive-by parasite the other day whilst checking out some Web stuff. Annoying, as usual, but I was able to annihilate the little bastard. If you Windows and IE users are not aware, parasite is a vernacular term used to describe unsolicited commercial software, or a program that gets installed on your computer that invades your privacy, harvests critical data and emails, slows down your operating system, and does something you probably don’t want it to, all for the profit of someone else.
Some are just plain malicious and do something quite nasty, such as:
- 1. degrade system performance and cause errors or system shut-down;
- 2. plague you with unwanted advertising (adware);
- 3. see everything you do online and send information back to marketing companies (spyware);
- 4. add advertising links to Web pages for which the author does not get paid, and redirect the payments from affiliate-fee schemes to the makers of the software (scumware);
- 5. set browser home page and search settings to point to hijacker sites and prevent you changing it back (homepage hijackers);
- 6. force your your modem (any modem) to call mega-rate phone numbers (dialers);
- 7. leave security holes allowing evil people or anyone at all to download and run software on your machine; and
- 8. provide no uninstall feature, and place code in hidden places to make it difficult to remove.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve been a Web geek since it was mind-blowing to see a horizontal rule displayed (forget color), and these disgusting people have taken the fun and purity out of what was once a medium strictly bound by the honor system and rigidly self-enforced for the good of all. If you feel as I do, here are links to sites dealing with preventing and fighting spam: