David Neal

Roused from sleep the other day, I returned to my desk to find a large pop-up window filling my screen. Nothing unusual in this, since even a visit to my Hotmail account will supply me with an advertisement. However, what was unusual was that the page was filled with hardcore pornography.

Not just your run-of-the-mill adult entertainment either. This was the kind of stuff that even in Amsterdam you would probably have to ask for at the counter. And even there would be greeted with a sickened look from the shopkeeper, who would pause his viewing of Hannah and Her Very Obliging Sisters to usher you from the shop.

Unpleasant stuff, and not the sort of pop-up ad that would come from the range of sites I visit at work - so where had it come from?

Purely for research purposes, I recently downloaded a few free MP3s and shortly afterwards noticed a box in my line of minimised windows that would not open anything when I clicked on it. It looked even more suspicious because the only text legible in it was "Micors...", something that made me assume that it was supposed to look like a Microsoft Internet Explorer page.

This finding, coupled with the pop-ups, led me to realise that I must have downloaded some kind of advert-serving spyware, which was now residing on my machine. At this point I felt vaguely Holmesian, but could I track it down? Nope, and to make matters worse, the plot thickened.

Speaking to my mum shortly afterwards, I was told that a similar problem existed at home, whereby a number of "colourful links" had found their way into the favourites folder... unless, my mum said, these were sites that I had left bookmarked. Just to make sure, I asked her what they were.

I don't know what sort of content a Viagra video includes, but I would hazard a guess that it might feature an old man, a pointing finger, a stopwatch, and a look that combines amazement and self-satisfaction. I told my mum I would not bookmark such a URL even if I was interested in it, which I am not.

As you can imagine this was rather embarrassing and in the office it was potentially employment-threatening. Although I am not sure whether we are monitored when using the internet, I have noticed glints in the distance which may come from telescope lenses, so I would rather stay on the right side of best practice... at least until I hear differently.

But as the "penile problems?" adverts lead me to believe, help - and improved satisfaction - is at hand. Within 20 minutes I had found, downloaded and run Lavasoft's Ad-Aware program, a nice little and, most importantly, free tool that found all my offending objects and quarantined them. I took the software home to mum and was equally pleased.

What concerns me now is how easy it was for my PC to become infected in this way, highlighting the insecurity of the average internet browsing desktop machine.

The fact that this Trojan software was able to slip unnoticed onto my hard drive and go about its business without so much as a hello is particularly worrying, especially if you imagine how many other machines might be affected in the same way.

Because of concerns about unfair competition, tools such as Ad-Aware are unlikely ever to be provided as standard on desktop machines, but wherever people are accessing the internet, such tools really ought to be standard.

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