My Journey Into Spyware Land

Chapter One

Once upon a time, in a far away land (The Internet), it was so much fun to just surf! Click a link here, click a link there and see where all the clicking took me! Wow, I found so many interesting things. There were tons of free stuff, too! Lots and lots of pretty wallpapers and screensavers to decorate my Windows 95 computer.

Dial up was getting faster, almost speedy back then. I just loved all that great eye candy! Microsoft introduced a clever program to install something called 'Themes' and there were ever so many sites that had free themes and I wanted them all!

The only things I really had to worry about were BSODs (Blue Screen Of Death) (and there were a lot of them with Windows 95!) and once in a while a virus would show up, but McAfee always seemed to catch it in time.

No one had ever heard of anything called 'spyware' or 'malware' and Trojans and worms were few and far between. The spammers and scammers were still beyond the horizon and the Internet was fun!

I learned so much about my computer (I practically lived on Microsoft's site, troubleshooting BSODs and other problems) and I was so proud of myself when I figured out how to fix a problem. There was no wonderful Google back then either.

One day my computer started acting really strange. My programs started to disappear. The computer was running oh so slow. Then the printer disappeared. Yikes! What was going on?

I booted into DOS and it said my drive was full. Oh, dear, now what? Then my younger son said his computer was acting really strange. When he booted into DOS, his computer showed the drive was full!

Then it dawned on me, we had two virus-infected computers. McAfee had let us down. So now we had to format and re-install Windows. Again. With Windows 95, format and re-install was a very common occurrence. I decided McAfee had to go and installed Norton. Norton kept my computer free of virus from then until I decided to try something else because Symantec products got to be such resource piggish.

I found Yahoo Groups and lurked and lurked, learning all the time. I was afraid to post anything because I was afraid of appearing dumb. Then I noticed something, the folks that were answering the questions posted by other users were giving the same answers I would have given. So then I got brave and started posting, asking questions and answering others.

Gradually, things started to change. Emails started to come in with files attached, virus! My email scanner always caught them, but why was this happening? Back then I didn't realize there were so many malcontents who took delight in sending out little code snippets designed to destroy someone else's computer or delete all of their data.
Norton started having updates more than once a month. On dial-up this sometimes took a long time and because system resources were limited, this pretty much took the computer into a 'can't use it now, wait until the update is finished' mode.

This was pretty aggravating, but little did I or anyone else realize this was pretty tame compared to what was coming down the road.