A comet lands on my desktop!? by Carole Guevin

A comet lands on my desktop!?

This morning was cleaning up old directories of bookmarks and apart from discovering that a staggering 90% of links were 404 as well as proliferation of domain squatters, show without a shadow of a doubt how the internet panorama is altered and evolving.

Fast. Very fast.

Needless to say that these bookmarks were not to star gazing related urls but nonetheless while checking an organization site - tada - a comet fell on my desktop.

My adrenalin started shooting big time since yesterday, while reading a bbs on *spyware*, you know, apps that install undetectable (to AV) code and executable as well as altering the registry keys. These nasties can be used to send third parties info about your machine - or even sell it and a new deluge of spam hits your box - or worst case scenarios - part of your connection bandwidth can be redirect to other servers and hackers can distance access your files...

So when the comet land on my desktop I just totally freaked - it auto-installed without me knowing and after the first few seconds of mouth dropping and panic - I accessed the control panel to remove the program. All the while the comet uninstall had the nerve to tell me that it had removed itself *successfully* but I would have to *manually* remove the remaining resident files as well...

What I discovered is a neatly left comet executable file in a directory... hello when I say remove the program - I mean REMOVE it all...

Now I feel a bitsy paranoid.

(If you use freeware you are at a higher risk of getting your registry updated with some fancy back-web code.)

-> next: Ad indigestion

Editorials by Carole Guevin