I was recently contacted by QUE Publishing to write chapter 8 of Upgrading and Repairing Microsoft Windows by Scott Mueller. My chapter that I contributed to the book was all about securing and protecting Windows from pretty much everything. I talked about passwords, firewalls, viruses, trojans and of course Spyware. When I wrote each of the different sections I would install all of the protection software mentioned in my testing virtual machine and then try to infect it so I could get some good figure graphics as well as verify the step-by-step directions on how to use the products.
I started off looking for Spyware on Google. After a search of "spyware please infect me" returned no usable results, I started to think of all of the ways people commonly get Spyware. I did another search of Google for "warez" to see if I could find a good illegal website that would try to install all kinds of crap on my computer. To my surprise, even after I won an iPod since was the millionth visitor and was thoroughly educated about natural male enhancement, I was no where closer to getting infected with Spyware.
After this disappointment, I remember removing some Spyware know as Cool Web Search from a friend's computer in the past. I went back over to Google and searched for that so that I could infect my computer. Once again, I did not find anything useful other than how to remove the annoying toolbar from your computer.
I then moved onto searching some more Spyware that I removed in the past, this time that Smiley Spyware. You may have seen advertisements for it before. It is the "cool" software that gives you several hundred animated smiley faces that you can use in your email or instant messenger applications. Well, I began searching for this Spyware and after going through dozens of AIM smiley websites, I saw an advertisement for Smiley Central. Yeah! I finally fond some Spyware. I clicked on that banner right away and began infecting myself. During the installation process I also had the opportunity to infect myself with Cool Web Search as well. All right, free bonus Spyware!
I had finally done it, but in the process I had wasted close to an hour trying to get my computer infected. The moral of this post is there is nothing such as a free iPod and you can easily infect your computer at Smiley Central.