05-20-2004, 12:34 AM
Quote:Okay, but how does that explain why my firewall all of a sudden started making everything run slow?
In a word, maybe. Spyware is sneaky little shit that records the types of websites you visit, where you live, and the such and then sends it out to a central "hub" that collects a buttload of marketing info on all of us. "So?"....so it uses your upload bandwidth to accomplish this, And it's just about always trying to connect to the hub to report on you.
That means it's an outgoing connection that is probably confusing the dog shit out of your firewall. Spyware is notorious for bogging down not only connection speeds, but the loading time of applications, etc. It whores up whatever resources it can get to. If you surf the web regularly, and have never had a program that rids you of spyware, your PC is teeming with hundreds of little spyware programs sucking your resources dry.
As for the firewall going Nazi on you, that's probably spyware trying to send it's information out of ports that are generally "open" (for example the ports that AIM, a web browser, popular games, etc all utilize.) . Your firewall sees that the port is being used but the data isn't coming from the program it should be coming from. So it slams the door shut on that port, causing the legit program to either not work or work very poorly.
Ask anyone who works in IT, spyware is the root of more evils now than Microsoft!