It was full of spyware

“My computer keeps crashing and it’s really slow,” said the plaintive female voice on the phone.

“Do windows keep popping up with adverts too?” asked the young man on the other end of the line.

“Yes.  How did you know?”

“Lucky guess.  It sounds like you’ve got a spyware infection.”

Spyware is a relatively new but growing threat.  Similar to virus attacks, spyware can give outsiders control over your computer or access to private information.  It can also make a PC unusable.

Webroot, a company that makes anti-spyware software, reported that 88% of computers scanned with their software reported some kind of spyware infection.

Blink and it was gone

“I was in the pub after work having a quiet drink with a friend.  I put my laptop bag down by my chair.  One minute it was there and then … blink … it was gone.  Just like that.”  This happened to one businessman recently but he isn’t alone.

Of 5 million laptops in the UK, about 100,000 are damaged each year and another 67,000 stolen.  But theft isn’t the only problem.

In six months in London alone, a staggering 63,135 mobile phones (that's an average of 3 phones per taxi), 5,838 Pocket PCs and 4,973 laptops have been left in licensed taxi cabs, according to a survey conducted by security firm Pointsec.

A stolen laptop can fetch 50 percent of its retail price and they’re easy to sell.  Not only but criminals can scan a laptop’s hard disk for passwords, credit card information or other valuable data.

There were five people connected

His small office contained three desks and three computers, all networked together and connected to a broadband internet connection using a wireless network. 

Two of his staff were out with clients and he was alone in the office with a friend who helped them out with IT problems.

The internet connection had been getting slower and slower and he couldn’t figure out why.

The computer expert quickly found the problem.  Trying to secure the wireless network, he had looked up who was connected to the wireless network. 

There were five users connected.  But only three PCs in the office and only one of them was switched on.  His neighbours in the office building and in the residential street outside were simply freeloading on his connection.  He was paying for the broadband and they were blagging it.

The friend quickly locked them out and hoped that none of them had used the connection to hack into one of his friend’s computers.

An extensive 2002 survey found that 92% of wireless networks in London had not taken basic steps to restrict access. That’s over 4,500 networks that are wide open to people freeloading internet bandwidth or, worse, snooping on private data.

There was a bang and my computer went dead

The rain fell heavily outside the cottage window.  She was sitting at her computer, connected to the internet and reading her email. 

Suddenly, there was a bang and the computer went dead.  A lightning strike a quarter of a mile away had sent a surge of electricity down the phone line and fried the inside of her computer.

Although the woman had insurance it took three weeks for the company to pay out.  In the meantime, she had no computer and no email. 

To make matters worse, when the replacement computer arrived she realised she didn’t have a backup of her work and so all her digital photos, emails and documents were lost.

Seven minutes

In the anti-virus labs, three computers were linked together to create a ‘honey pot’ in an attempt to deliberately catch a virus.

One was the sacrificial goat running a popular operating system without any firewall, anti-virus software and without the latest patches.

The second was a firewall to stop the sacrificial goat infecting any other computers once it was attacked.

The third was a database program which logged activity on the other two in real time so we could see what was going on.

The sacrificial goat was connected to the live internet and we waited.

Just seven minutes later a worm (a type of virus that spreads itself from computer to computer over the internet) had infected it.  Fifteen minutes later a different worm attacked it. 

It would be easy to tell the story of any of the millions of people who are infected by a virus each year but this tale reveals how quick and easy it is for these programs to find an unprotected computer and attack it.