Earthlink, a huge Internet Service Provider (ISP) has done a spyware audit of their users. Trojan’s have increased by 114%, a Trojan (named after the Trojan Horse) is a program that looks harmless, but opens a back-door to your PC that any nasty type can use to take over your machine to use for anything they like. The average machine has 25 spyware items installed, some are relatively harmless, many are not. This is a sobering report and it is this sort of thing that has forced me to install Firefox onto all my clients computers. Whenever I am questioned about why, I do a little test for them. First I make a list of 2o websites, and I send them to those sites in Internet Explorer. After that I have them run Adaware and look for spyware. Usually at least half a dozen are found. Then I have them visit the same sites in Firefox, and likewise scan for spyware again. The number of found items is nearly always zero. They require no more convincing.
Recently, a client of mine bought a new home computer and asked if I did home jobs. I went over to set up his PC/UPS/Scanner etc, and while setting it all up, I was given his old machine which I was told was so slow it was useless (a PII 266/64MB machine). After setting up his new PC, (and installing Firefox and Thunderbird, Adaware and a few other programs) I took his old machine home to have a look at it. This machine was Win98SE, and it had a staggering 453 spyware items installed on it. Not only that but it had 3 Viruses and a Trojan running. No wonder this thing took 10 minutes to boot, it had to start a ton of processes that did nothing for the user at all. I spent an hour cleaning the machine out, tidying up the registry, un-installing anything unnecessary and generally giving it the once over. Now I have a machine that is perfectly capable of handling E-mail, web browsing and Office documents. And for those tasks it is not slow at all. Best of all it now boots in about a minute. Before you buy a new system, make sure your old one isn’t doing a heap of stuff in the background that you don’t know about. If you are worried about Viruses and spyware, head over to http://tips.littlehosting.com/ for a detailed look at the problem and a heap of free software to get your machine clean.
Read the full Earthlink report here.
