# Spybot picking up Zedo, Statcounter, Double Click, Media Plex...what is this stuff?



## Martingale00

Hi all, Spybot S&D picked up the above "threats" on a literally 24-hour-old system. What is this stuff? It's my understanding that they're tracking cookies left by corporate websites gathering data about web surfing activities. Am I far off with this? Additionally do these things pose any threat to system stability? I'm just paranoid because like I said before I just built this thing yesterday. 

Also can someone tell me what websites this stuff comes from? Can it be anything, because I didn't surf any websites I'd usually try to avoid on a clean system because of threats. Thanks all!


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## Go The Power

*This will help with making shore you dont go infecte sites*

If you want to avoid any threats on websites use McAfee Site Advisor, This very helpful application will warn you if the website you are about to go on has been tested for virus and if any have been found they will warn you, it also has tested websites for spamming.

To download click on of the links according to your web browser

Internet Explore, Firefox

How to use it:








*Red X*- Red crosses means the site is unsafe; it contains one or more virus/spyware/malware, it can also say that it will send you alot of spam emails.








*Green Ticks*- Green ticks means that the web page is virus free.








*Yellow exclamation marks*- A yellow exclamation mark, means use the web site with caution because there are some safe and unsafe downloads.








*Grey Question marks*- Means the site has not been tested yet.

Here is a picture Example:


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## smz

Those are Tracking Cookies. without a doubt they are the most annoying. I actually have permanent cookies turned off in IE. I will add any site that needs them. Those cookies living on your computer will help the advertising companies serve ads to you related to the places you visit... So if you've been looking on a site that sells new cars, you might start seeing banners for car dealers as an example.

There is no threat to system stability, it's only a slight privacy issue. I use the ad blocker included in Kaspersky... Never even see the annoying ads.

Here's a great link all about these places and away to put them in your restricted site list so you won't get them anymore. Good Luck.

http://www.spywarewarrior.com/uiuc/resource.htm#IESPYAD



Martingale00 said:


> Hi all, Spybot S&D picked up the above "threats" on a literally 24-hour-old system. What is this stuff? It's my understanding that they're tracking cookies left by corporate websites gathering data about web surfing activities. Am I far off with this? Additionally do these things pose any threat to system stability? I'm just paranoid because like I said before I just built this thing yesterday.
> 
> Also can someone tell me what websites this stuff comes from? Can it be anything, because I didn't surf any websites I'd usually try to avoid on a clean system because of threats. Thanks all!


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## smz

*Re: This will help with making shore you dont go infecte sites*

FYI:

I just checked out the link to the site advisor from Mcafee. Take note of the fine print in one of the TOS agreements:

"McAfee SiteAdvisor will not track or collect any information about you, your data, or your use of the software except as we disclose in our privacy policy or as you specifically authorize."

I see the phrase "EXCEPT as we disclose in our privacy policy" I did not poke around looking for the privacy policy but that little sentence there may let them sniff some things you do, I dunno.



Go The Power said:


> If you want to avoid any threats on websites use McAfee Site Advisor, This very helpful application will warn you if the website you are about to go on has been tested for virus and if any have been found they will warn you, it also has tested websites for spamming.
> 
> To download click on of the links according to your web browser
> 
> Internet Explore, Firefox
> 
> How to use it:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> *Red X*- Red crosses means the site is unsafe; it contains one or more virus/spyware/malware, it can also say that it will send you alot of spam emails.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> *Green Ticks*- Green ticks means that the web page is virus free.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> *Yellow exclamation marks*- A yellow exclamation mark, means use the web site with caution because there are some safe and unsafe downloads.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> *Grey Question marks*- Means the site has not been tested yet.
> 
> Here is a picture Example:


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## Go The Power

I was just saying "if you want to prevent,going on sites that contain a virus, try out site adviser"


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## smz

I only posted that information about site advisor because in his original post he stated "I'm just paranoid because like I said before I just built this thing yesterday"

I definite paranoid as being a bit cautious of what I am doing online and is something monitoring what I am doing. I wasn't saying it was a bad product, just a slight loophole perhaps in privacy but like I said without reading their private policy, I don't have a definitive answer. Though I remember with Google Web Accelerator, part of the deal was you get the app for free in exchange for them taking raw stats of your habits without any personal identifiable information. To me that is still an intrusion. I remember what happened when AOL leaked their search engine database of 20 million queries that were linked to an anonymous user ID but contained data that was so specific in some searches that you could immediately tie that search and anonymous ID to a person.

That's just my heads up from reading the google policy.
I wasn't saying Site Advisor is a bad product, it most certainly is a good trade off to share some information with a large security company then to share the same if not more info with malicious sites and perhaps get phished or worse.



Go The Power said:


> I was just saying "if you want to prevent,going on sites that contain a virus, try out site adviser"


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## Glaswegian

McAfee Site Advisor should be used as a guide - not a definitive solution - it can, and does, get it wrong sometimes.


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## smz

Agreed. Geez if you think about it. You get phishing prevention support from IE7, Firefox 2.0x, and a similar solution included with Norton's Internet Suite. They call it "fraud monitoring" never should anyone think they are 100% protected with any suite. A guide a a great explanation for these types of applications.



Glaswegian said:


> McAfee Site Advisor should be used as a guide - not a definitive solution - it can, and does, get it wrong sometimes.


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## Martingale00

Hey thanks for the replies everyone, I appreciate all of the comments. I figured they were tracking cookies. Right now I am running BitDefender Anti-virus and Zone Alarm firewall and using Spybot S&D, Advanced WindowsCare (finds tracking cookies), and CCleaner. I think it's pretty clean, I think this is the best I can do. I might turn off all cookies though. Thanks again everyone,


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## smz

Ya know this is off topic, but does anyone else out here seem like it's a bit overkill to run as many Anti-*** programs as he is?

I'm not talking cr*p, just seems like some similar utils are being ran simultaneously. If active protection isn't enabled, it is not that bad. But Spybot has "Teatimer" if that's running, along with any active antispyware/cookie tracking shield. That's not good. If you are running Windows Defender that's even worse. I didn't catch the stats but I don't know if you were running vista which includes defender stock.

I post this in all the boards, but One suite does everything for me which is Kaspersky Internet Security 6.0. Everything you can ask for. If money is an issue, the Kaspersky Antivirus 6.0 is the same thing without the anti-hacker firewall and anti-banner features. I was surprised how awesome the real time spyware detector works.

I have a great site to recommend and it's free to test your overall spyware protection from a real time prospective. http://www.spycar.org

Run there spyware test programs right off the web page. Nothing destructive will be done. At the end, they have the program towtruck that you download which will give you a report of how good your protection was. If your protection failed to block certain things from being tampered with, towtruck will remove anything the test did without a trace.




Martingale00 said:


> Hey thanks for the replies everyone, I appreciate all of the comments. I figured they were tracking cookies. Right now I am running BitDefender Anti-virus and Zone Alarm firewall and using Spybot S&D, Advanced WindowsCare (finds tracking cookies), and CCleaner. I think it's pretty clean, I think this is the best I can do. I might turn off all cookies though. Thanks again everyone,


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## Kalim

If you use a good firewall, they have inbuilt features to stop cookies or control them. You can allow them in Firefox or disallow them too and furthermore control what you will like to keep cookies for and where not. If you then delete cookies on browser exit, you won't have a problem, especially as you use CCleaner to clear any tracks kept on your system. To block ads you can use the NoScript extension for Firefox, which is very powerful and effective for this task. I also use FlashBlock to block all flash content unless I wish otherwise :wink:


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## Go The Power

Sorry about that SMZ i miss understood what you were saying.

Zone alarm can block cookies.


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## Glaswegian

Overall security needs to be multi-layered - no one application can catch everything. I use all the apps listed in my signature and there are no conflicts.

http://www.techsupportforum.com/f174/pc-safety-and-security-what-do-i-need-115548.html


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## smz

You know one of the two greatest plugins for firefox in addition to noscript is Adblock Plus and "RIP" remove it permanently.

With that combo, firefox is basically going to fight off any advertisement that follows the simple patterns like */ads/* */banners/* or common sites like atdmt, doubleclick ,etc.

RIP takes it one step further and lets you nuke the IFrames. This is especially good for those nasty text ads that nothing seems to be able to kill. They get created when Javascript is enabled. However, on a site such as Googlemail, if you turn off javascript for the mailbox, the light version is just horribly limited. So I turn on the javascript and use the Iframe killer in RIP.




Kalim said:


> If you use a good firewall, they have inbuilt features to stop cookies or control them. You can allow them in Firefox or disallow them too and furthermore control what you will like to keep cookies for and where not. If you then delete cookies on browser exit, you won't have a problem, especially as you use CCleaner to clear any tracks kept on your system. To block ads you can use the NoScript extension for Firefox, which is very powerful and effective for this task. I also use FlashBlock to block all flash content unless I wish otherwise :wink:


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## Martingale00

smz said:


> Ya know this is off topic, but does anyone else out here seem like it's a bit overkill to run as many Anti-*** programs as he is?
> 
> I'm not talking cr*p, just seems like some similar utils are being ran simultaneously. If active protection isn't enabled, it is not that bad. But Spybot has "Teatimer" if that's running, along with any active antispyware/cookie tracking shield. That's not good. If you are running Windows Defender that's even worse. I didn't catch the stats but I don't know if you were running vista which includes defender stock.


Hi...no I don't have the Spyboy S&D real time protection on. I just have the free download and I didn't even know about the active protection. If it's turned on by default maybe I'm mistaken though. I believe the only active protection I have is Bitdefender anti-virus/spyware and ZoneAlarm for a Firewall. I don't believe those should interact neagtively. The Spybot I use as a scanner as well as Advanced WindowsCare. CCleaner just cleans out all of the cookies and internet history and also has a registry cleaner. None of that is active protecting so I don't think I overloaded. Maybe I'm wrong though. I don't see a huge strain on system resources, 2%-5% CPU usage at idle usually.


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## smz

Actually my comment wasn't regarding system resources.. Heck you could have all those programs running at the same time and have Norton Systemworks Premier on another computer and the Norton package will take more memory then all your misc programs.

By the way, Spybot's active shield is not enabled by default, a matter of fact, I am not sure if there is much mention of it on the site. I learned about it from a tech guy I'm friendly with at my post office box.

Within the spybot directory, there is a file named teatimer.exe, simply run it and that is it. There are so many options inside the thing it's scary. The only thing I don't remember is if you have the option within the program to load on windows startup or if you have to create a shortcut and drag it into your startup folder. It is very comprehensive but I don't recommend running it side by side with another true anti-spyware solution. This is included in the free version. I don't even know if they make something you have to pay for though I did donate $1 to the author's paypal account.



Martingale00 said:


> Hi...no I don't have the Spyboy S&D real time protection on. I just have the free download and I didn't even know about the active protection. If it's turned on by default maybe I'm mistaken though. I believe the only active protection I have is Bitdefender anti-virus/spyware and ZoneAlarm for a Firewall. I don't believe those should interact neagtively. The Spybot I use as a scanner as well as Advanced WindowsCare. CCleaner just cleans out all of the cookies and internet history and also has a registry cleaner. None of that is active protecting so I don't think I overloaded. Maybe I'm wrong though. I don't see a huge strain on system resources, 2%-5% CPU usage at idle usually.


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