Tag Archives: economics

Follow the Money; or, why does my computer keep getting infested with spyware?

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[EDIT] This particular post has generated a very large amount of email, and apparently is being read by a large number of people infected with VX2. As a result, I’ve edited it, to clean up typos and to add additional information about the exploits used, the way VX2 works, and the sources of the spyware scourge. New information is identified with [EDIT].

If you’re reading this post and you’re on a Windows computer, the odds are overwhelming–between 80% and 90%–that you are infected with at least one virus or spyware program, and the odds are very high that you’re infected with dozens or hundreds.

Yes, you. Even if you are technically literate, you have a firewall, and you never download suspicious attachments, you are almost certainly infected. There is lots and lots and lots of money in computer viruses and spyware, especially the variety that makes popup ads appear on your machine. The question I’ve always had, though, is who’s making all this money by infecting your computer?

A couple nights ago, Shelly’s computer became infected. Shelly’s technically savvy, the apartment we live in is on a closed private network with a hardware firewall between us and the Internet, and she also runs a software firewall on her computer, and she still became infected nonetheless.

I spent about six hours removing the infection, and also tracking down the source of the infection, and painstakingly backtracking all the popup ads that the adware displayed on her computer. My goal: Follow the money. Discover where the infection came from, and who was making money from it. The results were, to say the least, interesting.

If you don’t care about stuff like this, you can skip the rest of this message. If you’re curious about the mechanisms by which spyware and viruses work, who is responsible for them, why they’re so common, how they spread, and most important, who makes money by creating and releasing them: read on!

War, war, waaaaar in Iraq…and daddy wants a new computer!

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So far, the United States has spent a grand total of approximately $139,744,240,000 on the war in Iraq, not counting indirect costs or human lives.

*blink*

That’s roughly $474 for every man, woman, and child in the United States. You know, I could kind of use that money right now.

Or, put another way, that is:

– Enough money to build 69 space stations, with sufficient money left over to double the size of the Space Shuttle fleet;
– Enough money to give full college scholarships to 3,493,606 college students;
– Enough money to multiply the Federally-funded programs on AIDS and cancer research by 46 times, with enough left over to double the amount of health insurance subsidies available to low-income citizens;
– Enough to multiply Federal law enforcement and anti-terrorism budgets by a factor of five, with enough left over to double the number of guaranteed student loans;
– Enough money to increase the budget for national parks and wildlife preserves by two hundred and sixteen times;
– Enough money to rebuild every single interstate and US highway in the entire country, with enough left over to pay the salaries of 305,690 new police officers (at salaries two percent higher than the national average);
– Enough money to give every single schoolteacher in the country a $22,000 a year raise;
– Enough money to multiply the total national budget for education by two times, with enough money left over to double the budget for the EPA and double the budget for the National Science Foundation and pay for another Space Shuttle and triple the senior citizen prescription drug benefit;
– Enough money to clean up every single Superfund environmental site, with enough left over to double the Veteran’s Administration fund and wire every public school and library to the Internet.

I wonder if the war on Iraq represents the best value for that money.