Is spyware and adware becoming more insidious?

Factual Questions
1

I have a small network of 3 computers, 2 running WinXP Home, and one running WinME.

Up until about 3 months ago, I had nary a problem with Adware and Spyware and Viruses and such. Every week or so I’d run Ad-Aware and Spybot, and they’d delete a bunch of cookies. No .exes, no .dlls, nothing but a few tracking cookies no doubt installed via my Web surfing.

About 2 months ago, I was screwing around with Apache and php, and installed a server so I could do some simple debugging. Bad news. I shoulda thought about putting up a firewall before I turned on the server, but I didn’t. I was alerted to the problem when I started seeing adware downloading and installing itself. 2 days later and multiple reboots and adaware and spybot and norton scans, I was clean again, and a firewall is now running on that computer.

That one was my own damn fault, and I realize it. But in the subsequent months, both my husband’s computer and my laptop have had similiar things happen - all of a sudden, I see spyware downloading and installing itself. THOSE computers have never been set up as servers; neither are doing anything different at all than what they’ve been doing for the past 3-5 years. I’ve never seen anything come through our network like that before.

So what gives? Do I have some insidious spyware that Norton AV, Spybot, and Ad-aware can’t find on my machine that is working it’s way into the others? Is spyware just getting smarter? Are Spyelves letting themselves into my home and installing bad things at night?

2

I expect there’s a sort of arms race going on all the time - the smarter most users get at keeping out adware and such, the harder the adware producers try to circumvent these defences and achieve their insidious goals.

Also, many users are aware of viruses but not so aware of parasites. You can visit this website for free and it runs a script to see if your browser is currently infected by a parasite. It also tells you a lot about parasites and how to get rid of them:

http://www.doxdesk.com/parasite/

3

You might want to check out the Ad-Aware page (www.lavasoftusa.com) and look for Plug-ins for getting rid of more insidious sorts of stuff. I got a version of VX2 a couple of weeks ago and it was a real pain in the butt to get rid of it. Now there is still the occasional minor threat popping up, but mostly I’ve gotten rid of the stuff (:: knocks on wood::slight_smile: Mine seems to have slipped in during an OS upgrade, but it only bothers me with IE which I mostly eschew in favor of Mozilla.