Electronic Parasites

Are You Infected?

There may be hiding in your computer, thanks to unscrupulous advertising companies, what have become known as "parasites", which, like living ones, steal their sustenance from their host – your computer in this case.

If you are using Internet Explorer for Windows, below are some parasites which are connected to your browser and may be recording this browsing session. The program which found these ran while this page was loading. It was just a quicky low-powered scan which doesn't find everything. Even if none were found, it doesn't mean your computer is devoid of these nefarious (which isn't the word I want to use) programs.

You may have been told before you downloaded a "free" program (if you read everything) that it would connect to the Internet occasionally to fetch ads to display while the program was in use. If that is all that happens, then the "free" program is merely parasitizing extra disk space, CPU cycles, and some of your Internet connection bandwidth to fetch the ads, and you have agreed to accept this arrangement as "payment" for the program.

However, be aware that often the program itself does not handle the ad fetching and may not even control the ad displays. Packaged with the program may be a second program which handles those functions. You may or may not be told that, and even if you are, you are seldom, perhaps never, told its name.

But if a program or program package does more than you were told about – e.g., "Yo Mamma, Osama" or any other .EXE downloaded from TwistedHumor.com; Comet-Cursor; Gator; HotBar; Bonzi Buddy; KaZaA; LimeWire; BearShare; Morpheus; numerous "download accelerators"; to name a few of the worst offenders – or, worse yet, you didn't even request a download but something was surreptitiously slipped into your machine anyway while visiting a Web site or a pop-up ad was being displayed – then you really have a "worm" and/or "Trojan horse" program even though on the surface it does something you find useful or entertaining. Beside stealing disk space, real memory, "resources", etc., these slimy creatures silently go underground, watching and waiting.

Some lie in wait for you to visit certain sites or type certain words into a search engine, and if you visit one of those sites or type one of those words they pop up ads all over the place – and you think they are coming from the visited site.

Even nastier ones try to determine your e-mail address, collect information on your browsing habits (the sites you visit) and files you download, what you window shop for or purchase while on the Internet, and send that stolen information to a "mamma parasite" – the advertiser and/or advertising agency – by making a direct connection to "Momma's" server while you're connected to the Internet. They call it "market research." Firewalls such as ZoneAlarm, which monitor outgoing traffic (not all personal firewalls do!), will alert you to the unknown program attempting to make the connection and you just tell the firewall program "No way, José" and you have effectively neutralized the wormy creature and nullified its privacy invading purpose.

But some stuff the stolen info into cookies, and when you visit sites that have advertising from agencies which wrote or bought the info-stealing programs, code behind the visible ad reads those cookies and forwards the info to Big Mamma.

Some even go so far as to replace critical operating system components with their own version of them. If you uninstall one of those parasites improperly, if it can be uninstalled at all, it's probable you'll wind up with a partially or totally unusable computer.

I have nothing against free-ware; I use a number of free programs daily, and some are ad-supported. My purpose here is simply to alert the unaware that some freebies are quite above board, and some have hidden agendas they hope you won't discover.

If you'd like to know whether a free program you have, or are thinking about getting, contains adware and/or spyware, enter its name in the box below. If it's found in the database (which is large but not all-inclusive) you'll be advised which parasite(s) it contains.

To learn what the parasite really does and how it might affect your computer, go to doxdesk.com/parasites. Click on the parasite's name on the left side of the page. If it's not there, check some of the links at the bottom of the page. After reading about a parasite, you may decide "I can live with that", or you may want no part of it.

Note 1: Sometimes there is no Uninstall for ad/spy-ware bearing programs – you have to go to the Web site of the program's owner and read through Privacy Policy, Terms of Use, or other seldom read pages, or even the Download page, to find removal instructions.

Note 2: Uninstalling the program usually will not uninstall the ad/spy-ware. Look in Add/Remove Programs, or your Start Menu/Programs for an "Uninstall" for it. If not found (few will be), try Ad-Aware to get rid of it. Also read the description of the ad/spy-ware program at doxdesk.com/parasites – there are often removal instructions and warnings about and remedies for incomplete removals made by Add/Remove Programs.