Do you think no one is spying on you?

[Ramboy]

What am I doing wrong. I set the "options" and hit the "scan" button and it keeps telling me that I have no options set. Won't scan.

 

[paccool]

I clicked on the "computer" option and it selected all the rest. Takes a few minutes for the scan to be done.



Stan

 

[Sky]

I had 96 files

 

[Oasis-3]

115 files Thanks for the info.

Cliff

 

[B KIRK]

Had 43. Mostly Gator files. I usually keep track of my Cookie files. Didn't know they were in there. Thanks WOWZY.

BRAD

 

[WOWZY]

The invisible and silent Gator files that were found were program files found within Windows. Which file, I don't know but it hadn't scanned the cookies file at that point when it found them. I had thought that the ADD/Remove function would've gotten rid of it completely as it said that it did a couple of months ago.



I thought that I removed all of those files last night but it didn't. They showed up again on a scan this morning. I realized that I didn't SELECT all those files before I clicked it to remove them last night.



I selected/checked all the boxes this morning and it removed all of them.



Just remember to select/check all of those files you want removed before you click for them to be removed.

 

[SlyBones]

BigSaint,



Thats why I have been using the BlackIce Defender personal firewall. In a recent PC magazine article it was rated as one if the best. It detected every single attempt that thier pannel of expert hackers could throw at it. It also does not slow down the system too bad. Anyway I believe Back Oriface can be detected if you are running a firewall. Like you say, once its backed out its too late. You have to detect it while its in progress.



There are others that provide more features such as add blocking, and a some others. Be careful many slow down the surfing performance quite a bit. I think BlackIce is $49 a year and you get free downloads of updates all year long.

 

[JAK]

I had 9 files. Most were cookies but one was called Comet Cursor. Don't know where that one came from but it's gone now. Thanks for the great heads up!

 

[WOWZY]

My friend that sent me the Ad-aware uses Blackice also. He told me that Blackice nor Zonealarm (which I use) will prevent you from getting the spyware files like Gator or Savesmart because you get it from a download that you already accepted and it was just a tag along of the program that you downloaded. There's no way to block all of the download appendages like Gator that have paid to have these included with some programs. There's just too many of them around. But with a tool such as this one you can eliminate what might sneak by. The only thing you can do easily with a firewall is block individual cookies and individual exe. file sites, but it doesn't get all of them unless a POP-UP Stopper program is used also. The problem is getting worse.



Here's a good article on Gator from ZDNET:

http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2803630,00.html

 

[work2muchplay2little]

WOWZY, thanks a lot. I had 76 of these little parasites.

 

[Shovelhead]

Dang ... 173 !!



Daughter picked up Gator with a "free" video game download,

Thought I'd dumped it ... . Boy was I wrong!



I gotta keep the kid off the Net. yeah, right (She's 20 years old)

 

[grtescpa]

Re: Only Cookies so far....

Originally posted by joel

But lots of them. I'm pretty careful about what I download and have probably put the fear of god in my wife about installing freebies she's not absolutely positive about withough at least asking me first. I've been scanning with Ad-aware for about 6 months now and have run Zone Alarm for close to a year. Best personal firewall out there!



I also occasionally use a program called "The Proxomitron". It is very useful at many things. And can be customized, though I haven't had the time to delve too deeply into that aspect. The thing I like about this program is it prevents those annoying popup windows when you go to or leave a site. Those adult sites are the worst and this program gets 'em all. It also eliminates banner ads and blinking or wobbling ads nicely. You can make a list of OK ads to let pass fairly easily.



It does make using Javascript sites a little difficult and secure sites don't play well with it, but it has a handy bypass feature that allows you to disable it temporarily (until you unbypass it) in order to do things like your online banking or such.



If anyone's interested, the address to find it is: http://spywaresucks.org/prox/. Enjoy!



Also, if you want to read about security, here's a good site: http://www.grc.com

I would like to add that all that spy crap causes crashes and program lock ups. I heard of a company sueing for damages and loss of service because of it.

 

[nibranam]

spyware

Here is another free download that works with internet explorer. It tells you who is tracking you (as it is happening) and allows you to set different levels of security. It is called IDcide and can be found at this sight http://www.idcide.com (hope I did this link thing right!). It keeps you from collecting more spyware for adaware to remove. I have used adaware for quite a while and love it but you have to keep using it and you sometimes can't tell which sight this spyware is coming from. IDcide deals with this problem.

 

[The patriot]

Originally posted by JAK

I had 9 files. Most were cookies but one was called Comet Cursor. Don't know where that one came from but it's gone now. Thanks for the great heads up!

Hummm. I have something I downloaded a while back named comet cursor. It's a free program that lets you pick what design cursor you'd like. I have the sniper rifle cursor right now.

I have a program named "opt out". It's supposed to stop these files, or more correctly, notify you theyre present, then you can do what you want with them.

I downloaded the 5. 5 anyway.

Eric

 

[Fireman Dave]

14

I had 14 - all cookies. Not sure of what they were.



Thanks, Wowzy!

 

[joel]

Firewalls WILL protect you....

Wowzy, you are correct in that a firewall will not prevent the download of these components as they are parts of a download you've initiated. Nor will they protect you from the components being installed. What they WILL do is prevent these programs from "phoning home" so to speak. I use ZoneAlarm and every time a program tries to access the internet, ZoneAlarm pops up and asks if I want to allow whatever program access and the site it's trying to access. I can say yes, always yes, no or always no.



I've read a couple of reviews of the various firewalls and believe ZoneAlarm is the best for a couple of reasons. First, crafty spyware programs will change their process number or program name when they try to access the net. Only ZoneAlarm so far has shown the ability to track these changes so your "always no" really is just that. With BlackIce, they sneak through with ease. Check out this page it's got an awesome review of most of the personal firewalls out there: http://grc.com/lt/scoreboard.htm. The second reason is that it's FREEWARE!! Go to http://www.zonelabs.com and download it from them now if you don't have one already. Or if you're using Black Ice Defender.

 

[DNelson]

Holy bat, sh*tman, 142 found! That's just on my NT system - now I'll have to scan my Win 98 partition!

 

[John_Barks]

Just completed the scan with the latest ref files. Only 2 were found on my Win2k machine, both were cookies . Good download for those of us that have more people then just us using our machines.