Gator Project (A work in progress)
Gator is spyware and is very much like a trojan horse. Without you being aware of it, it gathers information from your computer through your internet connection. This information can be used for whatever purposes The Gator Corporation decides to use it for. According to Webopedia spyware can "gather information about e-mail addresses and even passwords and credit card numbers."

According to David Coursey, the Executive Editor of AnchorDesk on ZDNet says "Gator software allows the company to watch what you are doing in your browser and send advertisements based on your behavior."

Webopedia says that spyware programs also "have the ability to monitor keystrokes, scan files on the hard drive, snoop other applications, such as chat programs or word processors, install other spyware programs, read cookies, change the default home page on the Web browser, consistently relaying this information back to the spyware author who will either use it for advertising/marketing purposes or sell the information to another party."

In order to operate spyware steals resources from your computer and bandwidth from your Internet connection. This can degrade your computer performance and even cause your computer to crash or just impair how well your computer runs.

Where did I get this or how did it get on my machine, you may ask. Well, it's often bundled with freeware or shareware programs. You may be told about this or a green alligator may just appear in your system tray. You may also see nothing at all unless you run a program that is designed to detect and remove such villains.

David Coursey puts it well when he says that Gator "gives me the creeps."

One such program is Ad-aware. It "is a free multi spyware removal utility that scans your memory, registry and hard drives for known spyware and scumware components and lets you remove them safely." You can download it from the link at the bottom of this message.

One cautionary note is that your ad supported software may not function after removing Gator or other spyware.

David Marshall (Researcher for Anti-Trojan.org)
marshall_de@hotmail.com

For further information by David Marshall go to: http://davidmarshall.tk

For excellent computer security information, please go to: http://anti-trojan.org/

For more information about Spyware see: http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/s/spyware.html

For more information about Gator see:
http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2803630,00.html

For more information about Ad-aware or to download it go to:
http://www.lsfileserv.com/