747 Spyware, Site Meter

Tuesday, June 20, 2006

[Later edit - info on site meter view times, at bottom.]

I got a bit of a shock. I was just about to shut down and go to bed, when a window popped up, from the AOL Spyware detection program, saying that it had found a Trojan horse on my system, something called "InfoStealer". Hmmmm. That might explain why the system has been so very slow lately. It takes forever to IPL now - like 20 minutes. I had assumed it was because my hard disk is a mess, and defragmenting no longer works.

AOL offered to "block" the spyware for me, with the warning that if it does so, some functions may no longer work. Ouch!

I Googled "InfoStealer", and there are apparently several versions. One arrives in Yahoo mail (I do have a Yahoo mail account"), and it hijacks your Yahoo account. Big deal. My account is free anyway, so I'm not sure how it hurts. Another version is nastier, I guess. It steals your passwords to sites like PayPal and banking sites. A third has something to do with a Seal online game.

My biggest problem is that all the information I was able to find to remove it assumes that you use Symantec for virus protection. I don't. I used to, but the last time I tried to download a new version, it broke in the middle of the download, and even though the subscription I had paid for said I could download again at any time, it wouldn't let me. So when AOL offered McAfee for free, I had changed over to that.

So I don't know how to remove it, and I'm not sure I trust AOL to do it.

I gave up. I told the AOL spyware detector to go ahead and "block" it. I'm still here, but if I disappear tomorrow, that's why.

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Second topic, I added a site meter to this blog (you'll find the itty-bitty button at the very bottom). It's interesting where I get hits from. Besides those I know about, there was someone from Australia? Japan?? Romania??? Whoa! And I thought there only six people reading this thing. Well, maybe they're not reading it. Duration of visit is "0.00". "Suicide" is a popular search arg, and I think that's what's doing it.

[Later - I read the Help for SiteMeter, and "duration of visit 0:00" doesn't mean they visited only a few seconds. Since my last 40 or so posts are all on one page, a visitor is not likely to go to another page. SiteMeter counts the time only when a visitor goes to another page. To quote: "If they only look at a single page and then leave, we don't know how long they looked at the page. If they looked at two pages and left we would know they at least were on the site during the time of the first page view and the second page view. The difference between those two times would be the length of the visit." It's screwy. Meaningless to me.]