Spitzer Chases Spyware: Why the Insurance Industry Should Do the Same
Now that New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer is done with the insurance industry, he has set his sight on a larger problem–spyware.
Spitzer filed a lawsuit against Intermix Media of Los Angeles due to its activities of secretly installing software that creates pop-ups and often crashes computers. In a small, cluttered N.Y. office, Spitzer’s staff installed hundreds of spyware ridden programs while investigator Venessa Ip analyzed the hard drive to detect any unwanted downloads. Intermix Media settled out of court for $7.5 million and promised to stop distributing any of its spyware products.
You may be asking, what is spyware? It is one of the most disruptive programs designed specifically to damage or disrupt a computer system by creating unwanted pop-ups, redirecting your Internet browser to Web sites, and slowing down or even crashing your computer. Spyware can also gather information about e-mail addresses, passwords and credit card numbers.
Often difficult or even impossible to delete, it can cost hundreds of dollars to remove. When you include the down time, the damage can be in the thousands of dollars.
The problem
What starts as a cute smiley face program or an innocent little weather bug icon, can lead to a malicious tracking utility that can drastically slow down your computer, or bombard it with pop-ups. According to The National Cyber-Security Alliance, 80 percent of computer users have these programs, whether they know it or not. With that many computers infected in an agency’s office, the lost work and down time attributed to these evil-minded programs can bring an office to a halt within minutes.
The top five spyware threats include ISTbar, AntivirusGold, KaZaA, WhenU.SaveNow, and Ezula. Some recent statistics have shown that spyware is up 59 percent for the first six months of 2005, compared to the first six months of 2004. Spyware developers have produced over 3,800 new programs within that time.
The average time to fix a spyware problem is about two hours. For an agency with 10 infected computers, the cost to repair them all and get the agency up and running smoothly again is over $6,200, including 20 hours of employee down time.
Just about every person reading this article has come into contact with a spyware program at some point or another. One may only become aware of its presence once a new browser toolbar or unwanted pop-ups appear or the homepage changes to an unknown site. Welcome to spyware.
The solution
There are a number of removal options to consider when dealing with spyware. Some spyware programs have uninstall options that you can find in your “Add/Remove Programs” section of your desktop computer. Look for programs like Gator, Bargain Buddy, and XXX dialer. Once this is done, an anti-spyware program will need to be downloaded. The two most popular programs are Ad-Aware by Lavasoft, and Microsoft’s Anti-Spyware (still in beta testing, but available for download currently). Ad-Aware is $39.95 for the professional version, while Microsoft’s version if free. If the problem still exists, contact a tech and request he/she uses either HijackThis or LSPFix program to get rid of spyware.
There are also companies that can remotely dial into an infected computer and, for a fee, remove the spyware from the computer without ever stepping into the office. If none of these options remove the spyware from an infected computer, the next step is the dreaded system restore. This entails finding the hardware restore disks and completely erasing the entire system, after backing up all important files, of course!
Until only recently, most anti-virus programs have little to no protection from spyware programs. Common anti-virus programs such as Symantec or Mcafee will not stop the spyware threat from entering office computers.
Preventive measures
Start by informing the office staff about the importance of not downloading any programs from the Internet that are not business related. Hand out a list of specific programs that are known to carry spyware. Visit http://home.earthlink.net/~don-iteli/index73.htm for more information.
Secondly, protect your workstations with one of the software programs mentioned above. It only takes a few minutes to install, and they automatically update themselves nightly. These programs can be found at www.microsoft.com and www.lavasoft.com.
These programs are great for protection of the workstation in the small office or home, but for a large agency that cannot afford to have multiple units down, consider a hardware alternative. Companies like Sonicwall or Symantec have designed Internet routers that can detect and stop spyware from being downloaded. These devices update themselves nightly with lists of known Web sites that distribute this software, and since Internet routers are the portals to your Web access, they do not allow access to those sites. A notice such as “ABC Insurance has blocked this site” will appear. These products vary in price from $600 to $2,500, and often include a subscription fee.
To conclude, the best defense is a good offense. Get knowledgeable about the effects of spyware in order to avoid the havoc it creates and its reoccurrence in the future. Install anti-spyware programs on every computer, and consider installing a router to prevent the potentially hazardous downloads from entering the office in the first place.
Michael Curry is president of Curry Computer Technology in Pasadena, California. He can be reached at michael@currytech.com.