My systems person at the office told me today that over the weekend, my computer logged on at 10 minutes after the hour and logged off at 16 minutes after the hour for 48 hours straight! This is the first time this has happened that I'm aware of and the big question is WHY? There is obviously an executable file that has been planted in my computer that is doing this. SPYWARE perhaps?

Anybody got any ideas what it is and how to kill it?

 

DAMN! Sounds spooky. . .hope you figure out what it is and kill it for good!

 

See if this works. Ad-aware from Lavasoft.

http://www.lavasoftusa.com

 

Thanks! I downloaded the program and did a scan. Only 254 suspicious files! Gave it a good scrubing and I'll check tonight to see if it's clean.

 

I hate spyware!!!

 

I wish my virus checker had the same definitions as ad-aware. These programs, in the technical sense, are virii as well. People do not know they are even running it half the time! Its funny to see a savvy computer user's face after they run this program. :

For kicks, i ran this program on a few college girls' computers at the dorm. Each computer had no less than 4 different pieces of spyware. This isnt counting all of the countless cookie hits.

People write ad-aware off as some silly non-sense program, but after the first sweep of spyware, you will change your mind.

 

I consider myself pretty computer savy and was very surprised when I installed a new firewall and saw some outgoing hits to some very odd addresses. It turns out I had been infected with an application (spyware) called Auerate (now called Radiate). I was pissed - it was tracking every single page I was going to.

 

MyBad:

Do you have any scheduled events running on any NT machines? It sounds like you have event scheduler running something as your user name. This would explain the very systematic 6 minute interval. Not saying this isnt spyware, but something you should check.

If this is whats happening, you probably should be careful. If you ever change your password, this event will hit your account a couple times with a bad password and disable your account

 

I checked the scheduler and that wasn't what was causing it. After cleaning the crap files out, my computer is almost twice as fast. Amazing! I'm certain spyware was the culpret.

Thanks for the advice. I'll check the network event log in the morning.

 

What are all the processes running on your computer? There's a lot of spyware out there including some that ad-aware doesn't know about.