Online vigilantes counter spyware

There are good Samaritans willing to donate time to save infected computers.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
It can, and often does, start something like this:
You're online, maybe searching for a specific piece of information, maybe just cruising the Web. I was investigating new search technologies that were advertised as useful in dealing with variations in the spelling of names and had read that Lycos, a pre-Google Internet portal and search engine, had developed some.
I found links for Lycos and clicked on one. That was the beginning. Within minutes, my computer was swamped with advertisements -- pop-ups, pop-unders, pop-all-overs. There were so many I couldn't close them before others started appearing. I had to shut the computer down.
When it restarted, my Web browser had a new pornographic home page, and soon another flood of advertisements was under way. This time, I was able to get rid of most of it and resume working.
It went on for days. The blizzard of ads sometimes thinned, sometimes thickened. At times, there were so many that the computer couldn't process them all and froze. Every time I restarted, my home page was reset to the pornographic site. Every time I tried to do a Google search, a Lycos search engine appeared instead. New items for services called Bargain Buddies and Deal Helper were added to my Web favorites list.
I deleted these entries, but they would mysteriously reappear. Once, when I was being buried yet again by ads, I heard my computer modem dialing a telephone number. My computer is connected to a broadband Internet access service, so the only time I ever used the modem was to send and receive faxes. I couldn't imagine why the modem was dialing. More to the point, I couldn't stop it.
So what did I do? I cursed and screamed. I tried to turn the modem off with software switches. Finally, I did what any sophisticated computer user would do -- I yanked the telephone cord out of the wall, then began wildly deleting every suspicious file I could find on my system.
Most days, I was able to slog along and there were even times I thought the fixes had worked. But the computer was still agonizingly slow, and the ads and the hijacked Web searches invariably reappeared. Then a month later, I received a bill for $25 from some company I had never heard of. It was for the telephone call my computer had made, to Britain, it turned out.
The Internet, at once one of the wonders of the modern world and one of its least likable neighborhoods, has suffered a series of afflictions, scams and perversions throughout its brief history. The latest and in many ways most frustrating is the one I was now facing -- spyware.
Spyware is a broad category of software distributed online, usually without a user's knowledge, to millions of personal computers around the world, often crippling them in the process.
In most cases, someone is being paid to make your computer useless. That is the special irritation experienced by afflicted computer owners: Someone is profiting from their misery. Or at least, that was the special irritation that got me.
On the days my computer let me, I searched the Web for the origins of my problems. I felt like a lonesome settler in the Wild West, besieged by outlaws. Where was the posse when you needed it?
That's when I stumbled onto AumHa.org, a Web site named for the first and last letters of the Sanskrit alphabet. Wherever I had expected salvation might reside, it was not in a land where the residents spoke Sanskrit.
No matter. My posse had arrived.
Ignorance
One of the more discomforting aspects of the modern world is most of its inhabitants' utter ignorance of the technology that shapes it. Not one in 100 computer users has the least idea of what goes on inside the machines they spend many waking hours engaged with. They have no more concept of what's under the lid of their computer boxes than Ptolemy had of what was on the dark side of the moon.
One of the charms of the same modern world is the degree to which there has emerged a vigorous, selfless missionary corps dedicated to explaining -- and where that's undoable -- leading the benighted rest of us to safety.
That the missionaries can be a pretty weird lot does not matter. Mine included the guy with the Sanskrit Web site, a bartender and an epicure from Pennsylvania.
The AumHa Web forum was begun five years ago by Jim Eshelman, "mainly," he said, "as a place to post my resume." At the time, Eshelman was approaching middle age with no real career or even relevant experience necessary to begin one.
He was a longtime computer hobbyist who in the mid-1980s had begun a computer support company. He discovered he "liked helping people and hated doing business."
A decade later he built his current Web site and within weeks was getting "a lot of e-mail that was hard to answer." It didn't matter. Other people -- people he did not know -- leaped onto his site to help. To Eshelman, this communitarian attitude was a throwback to his hobbyist days.
"It used to be [information technology] knowledge was like drugs -- if you had some, you shared it with friends," he said.
He sought to continue that attitude through his new site, which gradually built both an audience -- now almost 7 million visits a month -- and, more important, a community of like-minded hobbyists eager to contribute what they knew.
The site has multiple forums for various computing problems, but the overwhelming number of inquiries in the last year have dealt with spyware, which on the site has a variety of less neutral names, "scumware" being one of the more polite. Scumware had been an epidemic; in the last year it grew into a pandemic, said Steve Wechsler, one of those drawn to Eshelman's site.
"I hate bullies. I've hated bullies my whole life. They prey on people. I'm not going to sit by and do nothing," he said. "It's your computer. They have no right to assault it."
'Drive-by download'
AumHa's volunteers instructed me to download, for free, diagnostic tools and spyware cleaners. The most interesting of these is a small program developed by a Dutch graduate student that takes a snapshot of important settings in your operating system, Web browser and other software. You are asked to post this snapshot on AumHa's forum, where your computer is scrutinized by whoever happens to be logged on.
In essence, you are being asked to publish very private information (a man's "browser helper objects" are about as private as you can get) in a very public place. It's a daunting request. I paused for perhaps a nanosecond.
The site is a contemporary equivalent of the old highway construction crew: a lot of guys leaning on shovels giving advice to the guy in the hole -- me -- doing the digging. But it worked.
I had been fighting the spyware plague for more than a month. The AumHa guys fixed it in a day. For absolutely nothing.
Wechsler and Robear Dyer, a fine wine and food salesman, determined that I had been victimized by what they called a "drive-by download," in which a computer user is tricked into authorizing a software download.
The downloaded programs then burrow into your operating system in such a way that even if you notice and delete them, instructions are left behind to replicate them the next time you restart your computer. My frantic deletion of unknown files had been not only rash, but futile. I could have deleted for a decade and likely not have changed anything.
As Wechsler put it, I had been mugged. For all its guises, most spyware is either itself advertising or involved in the distribution of advertising tailored to computer users' online desires.