Famous last words

ByMike McBride Reading Time: 1 minute

“All I did was try to download a Solitaire game from the Internet”

Anyone who’s ever helped someone clean up a spyware infestation knows exactly what I’m talking about. One “innocent” little game came complete with 8 toolbars, 4 startup executables, 3 advertising generators, multiple registry entries, random processes and, ironically enough, an anti-spam program that that simply stopped Outlook from opening. (I guess that’s a fool-proof anti-spam technique, if you can’t open the email client, you can’t get any spam!)

When will people learn?

Needless to say, the small window we allow ourselves with administrative rights left on a user account so that we can roll out a new PC and then go in and install all the software that requires additional peripheral devices to be hooked up to the machine (blackberry, digital dictation equipment, etc.) after it’s already in the user’s office, just got a whole lot smaller.

tags: Spyware

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2 Comments

  1. Too funny! I’m pretty good at avoiding that kind of stuff, but, occasionally you think, oh it can’t hurt to download this. One trick I do is read the boring legal section thing that you have to agree to before you download. I always look for anything that says “third party”. This indicates that your probably will get some junk stuff.

    Reply

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