Spyware: Who has been depositing them on my computer?
 

I scanned my computer with Spybot and within a day I see 16 spywares on it.

Who own these - which sites did I pick these up!

DSO Exploits
XerOx
DoubleClick
Advertising.com
Avenue A. Inc
LinkSynergy
MediaPlex
WebTrendsLive

Any suggestions how I get rid of them. I have set security to level "High".

Thanks

You can get rid of them by installing / running something like ad-aware :
www.lavasoftusa.com .

Those are probably cookies. Deposited whenever you go to a site that has ads.

If you migrate to the Firefox or Mozilla browsers, you can set the options to permit cookies only from sites you allow, and permanently disallow sites you don't. My computers don't have any ad/tracking cookies. :) You can also prevent sites from installing any software.

The last six are definitely ad agency cookies. As to "XerOx", that I can not identify.

Spybot has a known bug where it reports "DSO Exploits", that are benign.

Thanks folks. One of them must have been from Hotmail.com. When I re-set the security, Hotmail and Gmail will not open, but yahoo provides a link to the mail area.

None of those have anything to do w/ Gmail or Hotmail. But, Gmail and Hotmail require first-party cookies. As soon as you disallow those, they stop working.

Some years ago, when I first became aware of spyware, I ran Adaware. It found over 800 spywear installs on my 'puter. Macs are pretty nice. And for the most part when Im not using one I am running hardware and software firewalls and Anonymizer. Cuts down on spam a lot too.

Download the microsoft product (beta version, free) from their website, it's done an incredible job for me catching stuff the others have missed. I haven't had any issues since it was installed.

I am adding another vote for ad-aware. Just ran it again a couple hours ago actually. There are hijacks that the other programs don't seem to find. I don't know much about it as I am not a techie, all I can say is when my comp starts with the pop ups I run that and everything is right with the universe again :)

Alison
Chugiak, AK

Even better, download Firefox/Thunderbird and you will probably go down to zero cack-ware on your PC.

www.getfirefox.com
www.getthunderbird.com

Good point. I think this helps a lot also.

Yeh, I agree about firefox. I had a massive meltdown a while back which installed a dialer and began downloading crap onto my computer. I picked up a lot in about 5 minutes. Fortunately I don't have a dialup modem on my computer so it was unable to dial out. It was caused initially by misspelling the name of a website in the URL bar which triggered the end of the world as we know it. In any event, I spent two days disinfecting my computer but some of the trojans were so new that McAfee couldn't remove them. One was so new that it wasn't detected yet and another was added to the list that morning. I know when I am licked so I backed up, wrote zeros to the drive, reinstalled XP, and my first move was to install firefox because the problem was initially caused by an active-x exploiit. Even before the meltdown I would pick up stuff now and then, but I am pretty careful about removing things. I have a perpetual license from McAfee through my school which helps. But in about two months of running firefox, I have had absolutely no trojans, hijackware, or spyware at all detected. There are things about IE that I miss, but it's a small price to pay. I do suggest getting a good virus scanner. McAfee recently came out with 8.0 which I am finding to be very good. It is much (much) less intrusive than its predecessor and than norton.

I'll third the FireFox suggestion and also recommend HiJackThis as another program to run to look for random things you might not want on your computer.

If you go to the websites of DoubleClick or Avenue A, you can follow the links to opt out of advertising cookies from 4 or 5 of the major players (those 2 plus 2 or 3 others whom I forget). They do this by placing an opt out cookie on your system for each advertiser. Thus, you need to be able to receive that cookie. The site will then indicate whether you have successfully opted out or not for each company. Spybot will id these opt out cookies as threats, so make sure you don't delete them in the clean-up.

HiJackThis is one of the programs often needed to repair a 'really-infected' system. However, unless I've used it in an incorrect way, while it does a good job detected and removing some of the problem files on your system, unlike Spybot or Ad-aware, it doesn't indicate (and mark) what items it thinks are bad and should be removed. It's up to you to decide that.

In fact I think at the HiJackThis website, there is a forum where people post the results of their scans, and other (hopefully more knowledgable) people reply on what to remove. It's a good tool but it's in a different league from some of the other anti virus/spyware programs.

Jeff