{"id":40,"date":"2023-08-17T16:50:03","date_gmt":"2023-08-17T15:50:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.katsbits.com\/site\/?p=40"},"modified":"2024-04-15T09:34:08","modified_gmt":"2024-04-15T08:34:08","slug":"scanning-and-removing-spyware","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.katsbits.com\/site\/scanning-and-removing-spyware\/","title":{"rendered":"Spyware Scan &#038; Removal"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"ez-toc-container\" class=\"ez-toc-v2_0_80 counter-hierarchy ez-toc-counter ez-toc-grey ez-toc-container-direction\">\n<div class=\"ez-toc-title-container\">\n<p class=\"ez-toc-title\" style=\"cursor:inherit\">Table of Contents<\/p>\n<span class=\"ez-toc-title-toggle\"><a href=\"#\" class=\"ez-toc-pull-right ez-toc-btn ez-toc-btn-xs ez-toc-btn-default ez-toc-toggle\" aria-label=\"Toggle Table of Content\"><span class=\"ez-toc-js-icon-con\"><span class=\"\"><span class=\"eztoc-hide\" style=\"display:none;\">Toggle<\/span><span class=\"ez-toc-icon-toggle-span\"><svg style=\"fill: #999;color:#999\" xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\" class=\"list-377408\" width=\"20px\" height=\"20px\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\" fill=\"none\"><path d=\"M6 6H4v2h2V6zm14 0H8v2h12V6zM4 11h2v2H4v-2zm16 0H8v2h12v-2zM4 16h2v2H4v-2zm16 0H8v2h12v-2z\" fill=\"currentColor\"><\/path><\/svg><svg style=\"fill: #999;color:#999\" class=\"arrow-unsorted-368013\" xmlns=\"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2000\/svg\" width=\"10px\" height=\"10px\" viewBox=\"0 0 24 24\" version=\"1.2\" baseProfile=\"tiny\"><path d=\"M18.2 9.3l-6.2-6.3-6.2 6.3c-.2.2-.3.4-.3.7s.1.5.3.7c.2.2.4.3.7.3h11c.3 0 .5-.1.7-.3.2-.2.3-.5.3-.7s-.1-.5-.3-.7zM5.8 14.7l6.2 6.3 6.2-6.3c.2-.2.3-.5.3-.7s-.1-.5-.3-.7c-.2-.2-.4-.3-.7-.3h-11c-.3 0-.5.1-.7.3-.2.2-.3.5-.3.7s.1.5.3.7z\"\/><\/svg><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<nav><ul class='ez-toc-list ez-toc-list-level-1 ' ><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-3'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-1\" href=\"https:\/\/www.katsbits.com\/site\/scanning-and-removing-spyware\/#Whats_going_on%E2%80%A6\" >What&#8217;s going on&#8230;?<\/a><\/li><li class='ez-toc-page-1 ez-toc-heading-level-3'><a class=\"ez-toc-link ez-toc-heading-2\" href=\"https:\/\/www.katsbits.com\/site\/scanning-and-removing-spyware\/#Spyware_Removal\" >Spyware Removal<\/a><\/li><\/ul><\/nav><\/div>\n<div style=\"background-color:#FFF4E8; border:1px solid #C60; padding:1%; color:#C00\"><i>The  article below was originally published some time ago and now remains online as an informational resource and archive.<\/i><\/div>\n<hr \/>\n<p>Yes I know this isn&#8217;t quite a Quake 3 Arena matter but I just know you&#8217;re going be interested in this one non the less. I hadn&#8217;t really given this much thought until I came across a message thread on the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.polycount.com\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"noopener\">polycount<\/a> forums; somebody was talking about finding this weird .exe program on their system and they couldn&#8217;t figure out what it was or what it was doing there (it wasn&#8217;t a virus etc.). He mentioned it to a friend and was told that it was a piece of <i>spyware<\/i> and that he should download this program that finds and deletes these (often hidden) files from his system.<\/p>\n<p>He did and found nearly 200 suspect files, that&#8217;s a lot of files..!<\/p>\n<p>I thought this was interesting, what are these programs?, so I investigated further just to make sure it was legit, it was &#8211; I actually received that same day a Webmonkey weekly that had a link to the file for download.<\/p>\n<p>I downloaded the program, virus scanned it, several times I might add :-), and installed it. I found 30 suspect files on my system.<\/p>\n<h3><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Whats_going_on%E2%80%A6\"><\/span>What&#8217;s going on&#8230;?<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h3>\n<p>Everybody knows what a &#8216;cookie&#8217; is right? In a nutshell, a text file containing some basic details about you that web sites use to &#8216;track&#8217; visitors, well there&#8217;s also another form of tracking device, which is &#8216;smarter&#8217;, called &#8216;spyware&#8217; (it can be in the form of a simple &#8216;cookie&#8217; text file, or an actual <i><b>.exe<\/b><\/i> program) and companies actively use it to collect data on what you do, usually whilst you&#8217;re online; what banner ad&#8217;s you click, what pages you visit and the content you&#8217;re interested in seeing. This one of the reasons we always seem to get so much junk mail.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately this data can also include your more sensitive details, such as <i><b>credit card numbers<\/b><\/i>. Because the text files this data is stored on aren&#8217;t natively encrypted or secure, it means these details are open to possible viewing by any 3rd party that get access to your system. Not something you&#8217;d want?<\/p>\n<p>Our problems is, we don&#8217;t know this stuff is there, sitting on our hard drives gather and sending data. In some instances it can even effect the efficiency of your dial-up connection. There are ways to detect it but you need to really know your way around Windows.<\/p>\n<p>Fire walls and such don&#8217;t necessarily work either as the data is often &#8216;bundled&#8217; in a packet sent via a program that has permission to access the net, Internet Explorer, for example. They are not classed as viruses or worms so a virus scanner won&#8217;t pick them up.<\/p>\n<h3><span class=\"ez-toc-section\" id=\"Spyware_Removal\"><\/span>Spyware Removal<span class=\"ez-toc-section-end\"><\/span><\/h3>\n<p>The only &#8216;weapon&#8217; we have is anti spyware software (like AdWare), who use their own database of suspect files (much the same way a virus scanner works) to remove the files it finds (you do have a choice so you don&#8217;t delete something you should or have doubts about). I&#8217;ve used it (I always scan my system after a heavy session online), and it checks out OK, it&#8217;s a freebie &#8211; always gets the thumbs up &#8211; so if you&#8217;re interested follow the link and get it. (Make sure you follow the usual precautions about installing new software; scan it etc. etc.) <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":150,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,173],"tags":[44,42,128,43,45],"class_list":["post-40","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","category-misc","tag-adware","tag-articles","tag-quake-iii","tag-spyware","tag-virus"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.katsbits.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.katsbits.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.katsbits.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.katsbits.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.katsbits.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.katsbits.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51,"href":"https:\/\/www.katsbits.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40\/revisions\/51"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.katsbits.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.katsbits.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.katsbits.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.katsbits.com\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}