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Sambhar Mafia - Cooked To Kill!

Monday, September 11, 2006

Beware Of Seekmo Spyware

Many Indian bloggers have installed a script from Fast Online Users to track the number of visitors viewing a particular blog at any given time. I was also using this till recently. Few blog readers started pointing out to me that they see a spyware pop-up message from Seekmo spyware when they visit my blog. Further investigation revealed that these people visited the blog through search engines. Since I didn’t know the source of the problem, I just ignored it. Regular readers who either type the URL (click on it from their bookmarks) and the ones who read it through a RSS reader never experienced such spyware problems.



Neha then sent me a screenshot of the spyware (shown above) and also highlighted the script that was causing trouble. After this, I have removed the Fast Online Users script and hopefully such a spyware message should not pop-up yet again. For those using Fast Online Users, this is a gentle request to take it off as you might be inconveniencing your readers even without your own knowledge. Here is a live example of the Seekmo Spyware. Click on the first search result in this link. When you visit the site, you will be experiencing the spyware message. Pls spread the word.

posted by Kaps at 2:59 PM

4 Comments:

  • I don't know a lot about spyware, but there's a lot of (possibly personal) info (about Neha, and even an email address) in that screenshot!

    By Blogger Anand, at 10:08 PM  

  • Anand,
    Thanks for pointing out. Have removed the email address.

    By Blogger Kaps, at 10:52 AM  

  • This is not the first time a visitor tracker has turned into spyware/adware. Lazygeek's blog had this problem when the tracker netstat changed to webstats4u.

    Lot of bloggers are obsessed about statistics. They install 4 or 5 counters to track the visitors. This makes the page loading slower and annoys the visitor. Due to this I block all the visitor tracker sites using Adblock.

    By Blogger Saravan, at 10:55 AM  

  • Kaps, thanks for pointing that out and was wondering where all the queries were coming from as I had not had a chance to visit my blogroll. I had tested this before and did not find any spyware on my IE 6 browsers but to be on the safe side, I'll go ahead and remove it.

    By Blogger Krish, at 5:25 PM  

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