Spyware & an 8-year-old

We keep hearing about this thing called "spyware" - Congress is certainly confronting it (see Reuters report) - but many parents aren't exactly sure what it means. Well, a recent commentary in The Register literally brings the issue home....

"One of my friends called me in a panic the other day. It seems his eight-year-old daughter was surfing the Internet, searching for Barbie dolls ... when something bad popped up on the screen. She may not have understood what she saw, but she knew it was bad and so she called Mom and Dad. You can probably guess what popped on the screen. That's right, a page with explicit, graphic pornography. But wait, there's more. It gets worse." The site she clicked to somehow installed porn images all over the computer - from the desktop to the browser's Quick Links toolbar to the Favorites list. "The browser was also redirected, or 'hijacked' to display an explicit porn site as the home page." The dad tried two different anti-spyware programs, and they detected it but couldn't remove it. The spyware could update itself and did so to a newer version that the removal software couldn't affect. The dad, who works in the software industry, "spent significant time figuring out how to manually delete a malicious, system-level application that he never installed."

The problem, PC security experts say, largely lies at the Explorer browser's doorstep, and the reason is its popularity (about 80% of the world's Net users use Explorer), which spells significant impact for anyone with bad intentions. Even so, the odds are against your children having an experience like the above, but - to avoid it - you can switch browsers (to Safari on the Mac or Firefox or Opera on the PC). USAToday this week ran reviews of these and other browser alternatives. Or turn up Explorer's security setting to "high" (the Washington Post helpfully explains how). And CNET reports that more and more security software companies, such as PestPatrol, are offering consumers anti-spyware information on the Web.