7.    YOUR COMPANY OR YOUR SPOUSE MAY BE USING YOUR COMPUTER TO SPY ON YOU  

Companies have the legal right to monitor their employee’s Web surfing, e-mail and instant messaging. Many do, whether they warn their workers or not – so don’t count on ANY OF IT REMAINING PRIVATE. Last month, the University of Tennessee released more than 900 pages of archived e-mail between an administrator and a married college president in which the administrator wrote of her love for him and of her use of drugs and alcohol to deal with her unhappiness. Employers, including the New York Times and Dow Chemical, have fired workers for sending inappropriate e-mail.

            But the fastest growing area for Internet spying is the home. SpectorSoft, a leading manufacturer of spyware, at first marketed its products to parents and employers. Sales jumped fivefold, however, when the company changed its pitch to target spouses and romantic partners. “In just one day of running Spector on my home PC, I was able to identify my fiancee’s true personality,” a testimonial on the company’s website trumpets. “I found all 17 of his girlfriends.”

            What can you expect if someone puts SpectorSoft’s Spector2,2 on your computer? It will secretly take hundreds of snapshots an hour of every website, chat group, and e-mail that appears on your screen, and store them so that the special someone who is spying on you can review them later. A new product, SpectorSoft’s eBlaster, will send the spy detailed e-mail reports updating your computer activities as often as every 30 minutes. These products work in stealth mode, so that the people being spied on are totally unaware.

            SpectorSoft has sold 35,000 copies of its spyware and it has only a piece of a booming market. WinWhatWhere, another big player, sells primarily to businesses, but what it calls the “disgruntled spouse” market has been finding WinWhatWhere. Many smaller companies have sites that sell relatively crude “keyloggers”, software that records every keystroke typed on a computer.

            Isn’t all this spying on loved ones a little creepy? Not to SpectorSoft president Doug Fowler. “If you’re in a committed relationship and you get caught because of evidence online, as far as I'’ concerned you deserve to be caught.” he says. Richard Eaton, president of WhenWhatWhere, recognizes that in a perfect world users would reveal that they have placed monitoring software on a computer. But WinWhatWhere Investigator has a feature that allows it to be completely hidden. “Our customers demanded it,” he says. 

8.    A STRANGER MAY BE USING YOUR COMPUTER TO SPY ON YOU 

Hackers can get into your computer and look through everything on it if your defenses are down. Computers hooked up to the Internet through cable or DSL connections, which are always on, rather than dial-up services, are particularly vulnerable. A home firewall is the best protection against these seek attacks.

            Another prime method of turning your computer against you is tricking you into downloading spyware. Hence the name Trojan horse. This software’s danger is hidden inside a benign exterior. That’s why so many viruses – like last year’s “I Love You” and recent ones promising photos of Anna Kournikova and Jennifer Lopez – are wrapped in appealing packages.

            A lot of viruses are designed to damage computers, but some are aimed at stealing information. The “I Love You” virus retrieved passwords from victims’ computers to send back to its creator. Other viruses are programmed to strip e-mail address from your address book. Back Orifice, a notorious piece of software created a few years ago by a hacking group called Cult of the Dead Cow, takes over a host computer completely. Among its privacy-invading features; it can dig up passwords and monitor every keystroke typed into it.

            Computer worms and viruses can dig through the files on your hard drive. VBS.Noped.A@mm invades computers and searches for child pornography. If it finds picture files with suspect sounding names, it notifies the police and e-mails some of the files to them – and sends copies of itself to addresses in the victim’s address book. A big problem with Noped, in addition to the privacy concerns, its often wrong.

            Back Orifice is freely available online, along with newer hackware like SubSeven. There are sites like hack.co.za and astalavista.box.sk that hold a hacker’s hand as he plans a assault on your computer. And there are mailing lists like BugTraq that offer up the latest viruses. As a hacker posted at astalavista.box,sk: “Nowadays, every idiot knowing how to press buttons is able to take control over your computer if you are not careful.” 

9.    YOU MAY HAVE A CYBERSTALKER 

When a woman in North Hollywood, Calif., spurned Gary Dellapenta’s advances, the 50-year old security guard got back at her via the Internet. Using her name, he posted personal ads describing fantasies of a “home invasion rape.” Six men appeared at her apartment over 5 months to take her up on Dellapenta’s offer. Sentenced to six years in prison in 1999, he was the first person jailed for cyberstalking.

            Dellapenta met his victim off-line at church, but more often the first encounter occurs online. There are few hard statistics on cyberstalking. But Working to Halt Online Abuse, a group that helps cyberstalking victims, says it receives reports of nearly 100 cases a week. The stalkers meet their victims, according to the group, mainly via e-mail, chat groups, newsgroups and instant messaging.

            Jayne Hitchcock, president of WHOA, believes that her cyberstalker found her when she got into a controversy in a writers’ newsgroup. Her stalker sent sexually explicit e-mails with forged addresses purporting to be from her. One contained her home address and phone number and said she was interested in sado-sexual fantasies. At one point, Hitchcock was getting 30 phone calls a day. She was repeatedly mail-bombed – barraged with enough e-mails to shut down her computer. Her stalker also mail-bombed her husband, her literary agent and her colleagues at the University of Maryland.

            Hitchcock is lobbying states to enact specialized cyberstalking laws. So far, 33 have. In most of the cases that WHOA tracks, contacting the offender’s Internet service provider is enough to make the activity stop.  But more than 16% of the time, victims have to go to the police.

PROTECT YOURSELF

10 WAYS TO MORE SECURE CYBERSAFETY

1.                   Install a home firewall and virus protection. Hackers comb the Internet looking for vulnerable computers, in some cases trying to steal credit-card numbers and personal information. Home firewall software such as BlackICE Defender or Zone Alarm can fend off these attacks. You should also install virus protection if it is not bundled with your computer’s basic software.

2.                   Be careful what you give out. Don’t send sensitive information, like your home address, phone number and names and ages of children, to strangers over the Internet. Be careful what you put on personal home pages. If you want to post pictures of yourself or your family online, consider doing it on a hosting site that allows you to set up a password-protected access. And keep in mind that any postings you make on Internet discussion groups will be archived, and can be easily retrieved.

3.                   Don’t download anything unless you trust the sender – and the file. Harmless looking e-mail enclosures can contain spyware. To be safe, never download anything unless you know and trust the sender and have confidence that the file being sent won’t hack your computer.

4.                   Use dummy e-mail accounts. When you fill out online profiles, post messages in newsgroups or give out your e-mail address to strangers, consider using a secondary e-mail account from a free service such as Hotmail or Yahoo Mail. If it gets e-mail bombed, you can drop it and start over. Reserve your primary e-mail account for friends and people you trust.

5.                   Don’t let your browser be a blabbermouth. Your name and e-mail address may be embedded in your browser. Websites can take them from your browser and make a permanent record of your visit. To prevent this, you can go into your browser’s preferences menu and delete this information or replace it with a false name and dummy e-mail account.

6.                   Opt out. Check the privacy policies of websites you visit. Many are “opt out,” meaning that unless you tell them otherwise, they reserve the right to share your data with third parties. Opting out can be a chore. Start with the site’s Privacy Statement, and be prepared to wade through a lot of fine print.

7.                   Don’t accept unnecessary cookies. You will probably want to accept cookies – code stored on your computer that identifies you – since it’s hard to shop, among other things, without them. But you can reject unwanted cookies by resetting your browser preferences or using software like Cookie Crusher.

8.                   Use encryption for sensitive data. Before sending credit-card numbers and other financial information over the Internet, be sure the transfer is encrypted – that is, scrambled to prevent unauthorized access. Protected websites will tell you that the transfer is encrypted, and your browser will usually display a symbol, often a lock, confirming that the transfer is secure.

9.                   Consider using a anonymizer. Since websites keep a record of your visits and may be able to identify you by name, you might want to hide your identity with anonymizers like www.anonymizers.com. Anonymizers also encrypt the urls you visit so your Internet-service provider cannot keep a record of them.

10.               Clear your memory cache after you surf the Internet. Your computer keeps a memory cache, effectively a log, of sites you visit. Anyone with access to your computer can see your trail. Hide these digital footprints with cache-deleting functions in your browser’s preferences or tools menu.

And bare in mind . . . Encryption can be cracked. It’s not always easy to know whether spyware has been installed on your computer, at work or at home.

Bottom line: If it has to stay secret, don’t put it on a computer hooked up to the Internet.

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