Re: My home page has changed to "CoolWWWSearch" variant

From: N. Miller (nsm_at_blackhole.aosake.net)
Date: 04/29/04 

Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2004 14:15:23 -0700

In article <OQTgm1DLEHA.3300@TK2MSFTNGP10.phx.gbl>, thejd@uk2.net says...

> Pretty scary stuff! Perhaps someone from MS would like to comment on the
> security alg.exe?

And frustrating; indeed. I see that you got the attention of a couple of
MVPs. I haven't been plagued with the CWS software, so I have no direct
experience with trying to root it out. By all accounts on the sites which
discuss this pernicious plague, once they have hooked your computer, they
are determined to never relinquish control. They bury the hooks in a number
of devious places.

With any spyware killer application, you need to be sure that you have the
absolute latest version. CWS programmers are working today on the next
version, which will be missed by today's version of CWS Shredder. If you use
last weeks version? Well...

There are other sources of such nefarious hijackers, too. So you may need to
run a couple of other applications; always make sure it is the latest.

I've never personally been plagued by these things, and I am not overly
paranoid. I think. But a lot of people are less aware than I have become,
and a lot of people don't like the MSIE pop ups that ensue when MSIE is
sufficiently locked down against problem scripts. So I can see how this sort
of thing happens. The irony is that the people afflicted are least able to
articulate, technically, what happened. The people who know how to describe
the technical aspect are, usually, sufficiently secure that they are never
afflicted. Which makes it hard to pin down the perpetrators; who always hide
behind some pretty words, like "they agreed when they clicked 'OK'". They
need to be taken down. And it looks like, maybe, the U.S. government is,
finally, taking an interest. 

-- 
Norman
~Win dain a lotica, En vai tu ri, Si lo ta
~Fin dein a loluca, En dragu a sei lain
~Vi fa-ru les shutai am, En riga-lint