Spyware everywhere

I looked up to see my 14-year-old daughter standing in the lab, a look of frustration on her face. “Dad, I need a new computer,” she said. Of course, teenagers probably always want a new computer, but she seemed worried. We talked, and I found that the computer — which had been fine initially — was now running very slowly, could no longer access the Internet, and that some programs wouldn’t operate properly.

We downloaded a couple of freeware programs, Ad-Aware SE Personal and Spybot Search and Destroy. We fired off Ad-Aware first and after a while (it’s a slow computer, after all), we found slightly more than 1,400 spyware programs. We then ran Spybot and found another 50. Once we’d removed all of those, I told my daughter that she had to run ZoneAlarm, not just have it sitting around somewhere. After that, her computer ran just fine, and — in a sort of mixed blessing — she could also get to the Internet again.

The next day, I was chatting about this with my boss, who said that he’d had a similar experience on his computer at InfoWorld. In this case, he’d called in the big guns — our IT management company — and it removed the spyware for him. He said it made a big difference. I called our IT provider and found out that it uses the same (in the paid version) software that I’d used.

I called several more people who work in enterprise environments and found similar complaints and similar reports. Computers were getting slow, access to the Internet was getting difficult, and users weren’t able to figure out what was going on. The support staff, when they were called, was finding spyware in all these cases. It was enough to make you think spyware was everywhere, but of course it wasn’t. I did find people who weren’t having problems, so they either didn’t have a lot of spyware on their systems, or they had good firewalls.

And that’s part of the problem. Unless a spyware infestation is pretty bad, you may never know it’s there. That means if you don’t know that you’re passing information to the outside world, you have no way of knowing what sort of information might be leaking out of your computer.

Normally spyware keeps track of Web sites you visit, and may try to track buying habits and personal information. Normally, it’s not designed to steal confidential information from your company. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be designed to do that. In addition, spyware can record log-in and password info, and that’s just as bad.

Worse, because it’s hard to control the Web sites and pop-up ads that deliver much of the spyware, you could find this a continuing problem. You can control it by having a personal firewall such as ZoneAlarm that prevents anything from sending information out to the Internet without your approval. You can also control it by frequently scanning computers in your organization. You can even time it to kick off right before your automated virus scan. But either way, you do need to control it, if only because of the productivity hit you’ll take if you don’t.