Free spyware test

SPYWARE TEST #2 - This is a better test!

There is another simple test you can perform, although some spyware now installs themself for "all users" on the system, most still do not.

#1 - Create a NEW user account for your machine. 
Make sure this is not an existing account.  We are trying to create a clean user to login with.

#2 - Reboot your machine and login to the new user account.
Login to this new user account and sit for a few minutes.  If you start seeing popups you have spyware!  A new user account under XP will never have popups. 

#3 - Open one copy of Internet Explorer and visit this page
Wait for 5 minutes without doing anything.  The reason for this extra step is that some spyware waits until you are on the Internet with an open browser before they start launching popups.  If you see popups on our site you have spyware. 

Please Note:
While this test is not meant to be comprehensive it will definitely tell you that something on your computer is generating popups. Almost no popup blocker can block these popups because your computer is generating them!

The first thing you need to do is make sure you have Windows XP SP 2 installed.  Microsoft has fixed a lot of open holes that spyware vendors were using to get onto your machine.  This can be downloaded from Windows Update at no cost.

Never, ever download software from the Internet without knowing the company involved.  Almost every "free" music sharing software out there has some form of spyware in it.  Talk to your kids about it and tell them not to do it either.

Here are a few tools available to help remove Spyware / Adware from computers.

None of these tools are pefect, and most users will want to run more than one of them.

The tools below were not developed by Emerald Technology. By clicking one of these links you will be leaving our site.

Microsoft has released a very nice tool for helping to prevent your machine from becoming infected with spyware.  It is an application that loads IE (or any other app) and then removes its privileges so it is running as a reduced user.  It cannot install anything on the machine, and you cannot even safe documents anywhere on the drive other than My Documents.  It is a very cool utility.

Drop My Rights Utility from Microsoft

There are a few things you cannot do if you launch IE this way.  You cannot run windows update, and you cannot install anything.  If there is a new version of flash or some control you want to download you will have to load them using a non protected version of IE.

I have tried this utility on some very nasty spyware infected sites and they were able to get nothing on the machine.  Even if they exploited a security flaw in IE the process had no privileges to run or install anything!  All their attempts to install spyware on my test system failed.  That is how IE should run ALL the time in my opinion.  You should only enable your privileges inside IE when it needs them for something.

If you have children or other users using your machine you should definitely have your Internet Explorer rights as a user dropped do they cannot install anything on the machine.

This is a must have utility for protecting your machine from spyware.  If the attacker does not have the ability to install anything on your machine then the machine will stay clean.

NOTE:  You do NOT need this utility if you are running Windows Vista!  Vista runs IE 7 by default as a non-admin user.  You will be prompted for any security breaches before they happen.  This is a great thing in the war against spyware.