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State of spyware

Posted on 26 Oct 2006 at 11:39

Davey Winder is intrigued by this year's report on spyware, which reveals some unexpected results

The concerns here were twofold: some people thought that PC Tools, which develops and distributes Spyware Doctor, was charging additional subscription fees without permission, while others realised this was a spam, but were concerned that its timing was too precise to be a coincidence. Both these concerns are without foundation. PC Tools is well aware of this insidious spam, and if contacted will gladly put customers' minds at ease. No security has been compromised - with millions of spams being sent every day, a handful will inevitably coincide with a recent Spyware Doctor subscription. As with any other spam, just give it the Del key salute. There are plenty of clues for those who do go as far as to read this rubbish: it may wrongly refer to the product as "Spy Doctor" and not "Spyware Doctor"; it may have an order number that bears no relationship to your real one; and it may arrive from an address that bears no relationship to PC Tools - all the messages I've seen claim to be from spysoftcentral.com, for example, while their message headers show yet another return address and a forged IP address.

SiteAdvisor update

Last month, I gave my thumbs-up to McAfee SiteAdvisor (www.siteadvisor.com), an early warning system that flags potentially unsafe sites both when you visit them and, more helpfully, within a set of Google search results. I'm not in the least surprised that vast numbers of you both tried it and found it valuable enough to drop me an email to let me know. What did come as something of a surprise was that a number of readers said "by the way, did you know the PC Pro website gets a red flag?" - the answer being of course "no I didn't". It wasn't showing red when I first started using the application, so some digging was required.

In fact, SiteAdvisor wasn't complaining about PC Pro itself, but rather about a site that PC Pro links to, which is a distributor of software downloads. SiteAdvisor stated: "When we tested this site, we found links to 5star-network.com, which we found to be a distributor of downloads some people consider adware, spyware or other unwanted programs." This opens up an even bigger can of worms in that its wording is somewhat ambiguous: both "some people consider" and "other unwanted programs" ring alarm bells, as they could apply to pretty much any shareware download site on the web. Giving PC Pro a big red cross for linking to a site where "some people consider" some of the downloads to be dodgy is a disturbing development, almost on a par with airline passengers getting people with beards thrown off the plane. I still think SiteAdvisor is a useful weapon against click-through malware sites, but like any weapon it can be fired at innocent parties and cause injury. As always, use your common sense when using such a tool. Oh, and the good news is that SiteAdvisor has seen the error of its ways and reset PC Pro's rating to green.

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