Spyware Sneaking Into The Enterprise

30 Jun, 2004 at 10:22pm ET Article published in Tech

Once considered strictly a consumer issue, spyware is sneaking into the enterprise, eating up bandwidth, pumping out unwanted pop-ups, crashing employee computers and potentially posing a risk to sensitive corporate data.

“It’s rapidly turning into a very serious problem. Last year, it was mostly annoying with all the pop-ups, but now it’s leaving behind more serious problems,” Gartner analyst John Pescatore told internetnews.com. “In the last six months, it’s one of the top questions we’re getting.”

This issue alone has us contemplating locking down the internet for all users. I’ve personally spent many wasted hours cleaning out spyware from users’ computers on our network. -KF

Source: InternetNews

Comments

30 Jun 2004 ~ 11:28pm 289Mustang Aye, big pain in the rear at work where I clean this up.
1 Jul 2004 ~ 12:26am qparadox Thought you mean the starship enterprise heh :P
1 Jul 2004 ~ 8:55am muddocktor Heh, maybe if enough businesses get interrupted with this shiz the government will get off their duff's and finally do something about the problem. That or release information such as who (which company) released the stuff along with their exec's names and addresses so we can go beat the crap out of them.
1 Jul 2004 ~ 9:35am primesuspect sneaking? I don't have any "enterprise" sized clients, but I have small and medium business clients and they ALL have a problem with spyware.
1 Jul 2004 ~ 11:14am keto

qparadox wrote:

Thought you mean the starship enterprise heh :P

Captin! I canna holder together much longer! She's slowed to a crawl, and there's naught I kin do until the short medians arrive! (Scotty)

OK, Scotty.....give us what you can and we'll put the Enterprise on an intercept course with the incoming SM fleet. (Kirk)

Captain, I'm not sure how we became infected but my scan of our activity logs seems to indicate that it originated from your quarters. Logic leads me to conclude that your pR0n surfing and file sharing activities have put the Enterprise at risk. (Spock)

Put a sock in it, Ears. (Kirk)
1 Jul 2004 ~ 1:35pm GHoosdum We're locked down pretty tight here at Fidelity. The only way to get spyware on your machine is to have local admin rights on your machine. Only a few of us have it. Although I had to show one of the guys how to clean spyware off his machine the other day, since he had local admin rights...
1 Jul 2004 ~ 6:32pm mmonnin Yeah maybe some companies with some big money will do something about it.