• by May 18, 2005

By Anthony Muller

The Sasser and Netsky worms that attacked computers worldwide last year were like a real-life version of the movie "Hackers." Created by an 18-year-old German student who started writing viruses to impress his friends, they were briefly responsible for 70 percent of reported virus incidents, and may have caused millions of dollars in damages. (After the young author was convicted of computer sabotage, a German company hired him to write Internet security software - so much for "crime doesn't pay!") Sasser was particularly insidious, spreading without the use of e-mail, masquerading instead as the Windows process that validates user log-ons.

Spyware - an "umbrella" term for any program that installs itself on your computer, often without your knowledge in order to monitor and report your behavior as a computer user - isn't as destructive as Sasser, but it's more prevalent. Industry experts estimate that up to 95 percent of the world's PCs play host to some form of spyware, and no wonder. These days, it's possible to infect your computer merely by visiting a site that's tricked a search engine into thinking it contains relevant content, or by viewing an e-mail in the Outlook preview pane. (Not to worry the point to death, but if you're not using and regularly updating some form of anti-virus software, it's not a question of "if" your computer will get infected - it's more of a "when" kind of thing.)

By now, you'd think that the fake pop-up window with the phony Windows error message would be as discredited as that other great Internet hoax, the Nigerian e-mail scam. But spyware creators continue using it, because they know that 1) otherwise-intelligent computer users implicitly trust their operating systems and 2) software malfunctions are an everyday part of the Windows user's experience. In fairness to Microsoft, though, they also built a legitimate fix for misbehaving processes into the latest Windows versions. The old "three-finger-salute" (CTRL-ALT-DELETE) now brings up the Windows security dialog. From there, click the task manager button, then the processes tab to see a list of all processes you currently have running. To kill off a process, just click 'end process.'