Last night I was working on my computer and kept getting bombarded with pop ups. I thought that excessively odd since I didn't have a browser open at the time. I start looking around and decided I might have a virus. After updating my virus definitions and running a sweep, I decided to look into the processes I had running on my machine. There were several of them including rb32.exe. This stupid thing refused to die. When I discovered it was SpyWare, I went out and downloaded a program called SpyBot Search and Destroy.
For those of you who don't know. SpyWare is software that sits on your system and collects data on your activities and then reports it back to some other system. It's commonly associated with Freeware software. I think this latest annoyance came when I upgraded Kazzaa. That may not necessarily be the case because apparently this annoying little program will automatically update itself. I ran Search and Destroy and found about 30 programs/cookies/trackers on my system. Now I'm not a paranoid person, but this scares me. Who knows what kinds of other things are on my system without my permission.
I highly recommend you download and install the search and destroy program. No sense in wasting bandwidth so that someone else can send you more spam.
Oh... and you want to see how hard these jerks make it to get rid of their software? Try looking at this tech support question.
