stories

In which two readers were burned by high-risk computing.

Submitted by Peter; Tamuning, Guam

Well, to begin with, I tried to get Microsoft Office Enterprise Edition from torrents site mininova.com. There was even a whole bunch of comments saying that it worked "great." So when it finally finished downloading, I opened it, and got it installed. It really did work "great." But then after a few times running it, things started to go wrong. So I tried deleting, but it keeps saying that its "write-protected." I opened the folder and deleted random files … Read more

Submitted by Chris, U.S.A

I was--and still am--running UbuntuStudio 7.10. Now, even though this is Ubuntu, I can run Windows programs with Wine.

My friend's brother was playing on my computer and got into my e-mail. He opened up the Elvis e-mail, which contains a virus. I found out later that the virus got into Wine. Not too much later after the contamination, I started running Microsoft Office, when Ubuntu came up with an error. Firefox randomly crashed. Then Wine started running Notepad instead of the application I wanted.

I used Ubuntu's virus scanner and … Read more

True story, happening now. It's 1:48 a.m. on a Saturday morning and I'm hand-picking through a mountain of spyware and adware on a friend's laptop. I've borrowed the laptop and Internet connection to "quickly" finish some work, then quickly realized this was actually going to take all night. After a 20 minute start-up churn, I had only just gotten VPN running and Firefox loaded. It wasn't the interminable start-up that had me worried so much as the two casino icons squatting on the desktop. There's no way they were legitimate … Read more

Submitted by Chookkii; Willaston, Australia

After reading all the stories and blogs, I'm starting to think that maybe all the problems I'm having all of a sudden could be caused by the Norton Internet Suite I purchased this year. My computer is running slowly, programs are constantly "not responding," I'm getting error reports about programs that I didn't even know were running, let alone that they existed, and to make it worse, I am very basic on the computer. We did not have them when I went to school, so all I know is … Read more

Published by Jack; Brisbane, Australia

I run Windows 2000 Professional and ran Ad-Aware SE with great success. Ad-Aware stopped updating this year, so had to then get Ad-Aware 2007. This did not work. It kept seizing up while scanning, so I got rid of it and then downloaded McAfee VirusScan from Download.com. This is when my worries began.

My PC just virtually seized up. Every task took 10 times longer to do. If I wanted to open a window or go onto the Internet, I had to click on the icon and go away for 5 minutes before it … Read more

Editor's note: The topic of this Spyware Horror Story submission isn't among the usual culprits of computer stop-ups, but it was too amusing a story to pass up.

Published by Penny; Fallon, Nevada

My computer was running slower and slower, but it said I still had 75 percent hard drive space. I should have been suspicious when I started digging the ultra-fine undercoat hairs of our long-haired dog out of the keyboard as a way to fix my having to pound on it to get a response! I gave up, sent the computer in, and waited for the … Read more

Published by Aaron; Monroe, Mich.

Hooray for an event-filled Saturday afternoon with FailDows eXtraPainful edition (Windows XP)! I have been having a Trojan problem for the last week, but thought it was no big deal. Its name was something starting with "CC/." I forget the rest, but it didn't show up in either Symantec or McAfee's databases.

I updated my Avira AntiVir and started a full system scan. After about 40 minutes of scanning, it found one Trojan in three different parts of my hard drive. One was in the system restore files, one in my … Read more

Editor's note: Last week's story on spyware as a form of domestic abuse ('Do you know your hacker?') generated much response, including very personal stories from women whose lives were at one point dominated by the kind of controlling abuse described last week. Because of the deep personal, as well as technological, impact on these users' lives, one story is featured here today. Scroll below for the editor's response or click to jump ahead.

Published by Elissa; Michigan, U.S.

Shortly after a nasty custody battle erupted with my network-hobbyist ex-husband, my once efficiently reliable technological life … Read more

It's tempting to jam criminal hackers into a safe, distant profile. To assume the creep helping themselves to your e-mail, bank account, and surf history is a smug, slaphappy youth, or conniving foreign national. But what if you discovered that the one spying on your life was someone much, much closer?

How close? Like a parent, spouse, roommate, or significant other.

This is the topic of today's meeting in Washington. The Anti-Spyware Coalition gathered with representatives from McAfee and Google, to discuss the extent to which spyware abuse also constitutes domestic abuse.

Anna Stepanov, the Anti-Spyware program manager … Read more