Monday, June 14, 2004

Logitech spyware

In the recent past, I’ve battled such masterful spyware foes as myseach and apropos. To my surprize, the latest foe turned out to be Logitech. Logitech installs include a spyware known as Backweb. Though this little spybot isn’t nearly has dangerous as the likes of mysearch, it was just has hard to get off my system. I literally had to jet through my registry looking for the strings “backweb” and “logitech” in order to remove all references to this insidious spyware. In addition, I had to ascertain the difference between legit Logitech software, and their backweb references.
I started off my disabling the active backweb service from the Windows Task Manager. Then I found and deleted the directory containing the backweb software. Of course, it was looking all legit by being a subdirectory of the Logitech directory. Then I hunted through the registry as noted. There were over 30 references in the registry that had to be removed. When I rebooted, I had error messages because of the now broke links. I dealt with those.
Now backweb is no longer on my system, but I dread the idea of updating my Logitech drivers for fear it will reinstall its spyware.

No comments: