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 | The innocent network users, how exploits are targeted at them Every time you view a HTML email, there is a possibility that the code embedded within the mail will "call home" (the mail writer's web sever) to retrieve some fanciful graphics without you knowing. It would be most obvious on a non-network machine on a dialup account because you will see the dial-up prompt when you preview the mail, but in a LAN environment, it may not be this obvious. Thus without you knowing, the sender already know that you have received and read his email. For spammers or any other marketers, this is good news because they will actually know how many people actually read their messages just by checking the server log. For virus writer, this is a opportunity for them to run their virus on your machine, if you happen to have an unpatched version of mail clients that will allow program to be executed from within a HTML file. At times you will also get via emails or websites, programs that will have all sorts of nifty features that will give you anything else but your productivity at work but still you blindly install. Upon installing, suddenly your system begin to crawl like a hog and you keep blaming your boss for giving you such a slow system to work on. The support person came along and reformat and reinstall your whole system new and suddenly, your system returns back to the speed it normally was. Why ? Because you have installed a spy ware on your machine. It may collect information on your surfing habits (your darkest secrets), your personal details, etc. Worse still, it also opens up some ports on your computer to polls and listens for instructions from the spy ware site server (most of the time to display some popup ads). Unfortunately these responds from the server will not get pass your firewall or router because the port is not open for incoming traffics, so what happen is that your system will keep polling the server for respond and becomes slow and unstable. In some cases, the software polls so hard that it cause your the Internet access on your entire network to be down.Some web owners are offered a fee for every user they manage to entice to download a specific spy ware, while others are just victims of the system unawared. If "install on demand" is set to enabled, which is the default setting, the spyware will download by itself onto your system and auto install. (Without asking you you with a prompt, or installing it whether your reply is yes or no.) One of these software that many users "accidentally" download is Precision Time & Date Manager (its a bundle offer, you can't have one without the other). Check you system if you have it. It is probably somewhere besides your date and time icon on your taskbar. To find out more about this lovely spyware you can visit www.cexx.org/gator.htm. Our advise is not to install unnecessary software without your system administrator's permission. But then again, he may also has it on his workstation. Update on Dec 2004 It seems like there are some spyware that is not satisfied just to have control of your machine, they also want themselves to be the only one with control on your PC. Go to Registry editing has been disabled by your administrator to get information on how to take back control of your home page and registry editing. Why do they want to install softwares on our machines? Apparently, other than for getting revenue for popping up ads for the advertisers using them, there are some that writes the software in such a way that if you click on an ad, they would also pop up their affiliate pages in the background overwriting the cookies of the sites that you visited and stealing the commissions of those sites if you make a purchase. If you're interested in getting a commercial anti-spyware program, Pest Patrol which is known to be a genuine anti-spyware plus anti-trojan product. You can buy it via us using the following link; Otherwise, there are also various non-commercial anti-spyware tools like Spybot Search and Destroy and ad-aware which is free for non-commercial use. Spybot is donation ware so if it does help you remove your spyware issues, please donate to them so that they will keep the software updated. Singapore Network Support - Back to main page About Vectors & Interfaces - Our mission Computer & Networking Services - What we can offer Resources - Quick link useful sites News - PC News Contact - How to contact us Complaints - Complaints to make here 中文 - Page in Chinese | |
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