Science Experiment

I am a new member of the classroom, have been reading the various posts here every chance I get. My day job is at a help desk for a major electrical distributor. Our calls increasingly involve the issue of spyware. In an effort to become more adept at helping our users out (over the phone), I have set up a computer here and have been purposely clicking on every popup I can, in order to really infect the thing with spyware. So my question for the experts is this: do you have any suggestions of programs that I can download that will aid me in my quest to infect my machine with spyware. So far when I run AdAware, I've got 400+ critical objects…I know I can do better, can you help me? Thanks! mccannl

Are you sure you want to do this? We really dont encourage it. If you still want to do this PM me.

i woudnt reccomend it either, unless you have a computer you can afford to "waste" i can provide some "tips" for getting a "potpourri" of items. pm me to if you want. is this a stand alone? i wouldnt do it on a LAN.

Yes, I'm sure I want to do it, and no, I'm not crazy. And this computer will be recovered back to its original state when I'm done. It's a standalone computer. When you're helping people over the phone, and they are not terribly good at explaining what they see, it can be very difficult. First hand experience with spyware has helped me to better understand what they are going through. And it's not pretty. One thing I've learned was that when your computer is infected with spyware, the spyware can color when you see when you do something as simple as searching. For example, when I search Google for the word "spyware", the list of links that comes up on my infected computer is very different from the one that comes up on my clean machine. It's amazing how sneaky these purveyors or spyware can be. Anyway, later I'll try to figure out how to to the PM thing. Thanks for the offers of help. mccannl

You really can't beat first-hand experience IMHO. Some of the experts here routinely get themselves infected so they can try out a new removal procedure, but you should only ever do this on a stand-alone machine that is not, as has already been pointed out, connected to a LAN. Uness you're really confident and you can 'waste' that machine, it's inadvisable to deliberately infect yourself. All my first-hand experiences have been with friends and family machines. I've tried to help some people over the phone with this stuff and it's nigh on impossible when the person you're helping doesn't know computers …. getting them to run Spybot and/or Ad-Aware is hard enough, and HijackThis is really scary! It's actually easier via a forum strange but true! I've probably learnt more in those few experiences of first-hand removal than over the forums, but the forums are still good experience.

Well…I've decided not to proceed any further with my science experiment. I've got it riddled with lots of common pests (no viruses, JUST spyware. But I DO share an internet connection with other computers here in the office, and even though the one I'm testing with spyware is in a workgroup all by itself, I'm not willing to take a chance on jeopardizing the other machines in the office. I believe I'll quit while I'm ahead! Thanks to the 3 who responded to my question. mccannl