I have had an inkling for some time that my wife may be "spying" on me (late night phone calls to me when I'm on the road, confirming with airlines that I actually flew somewhere, etc.)  Because she is fairly computer illiterate I never suspected she would use the computer to track me.  Despite that, I quit using my home computer for anything other than innocent use a while back.  Now however I think she is considering installing some sort of Spyware on our home computer.  

My concern is whether this software, or any other software, can detect what I have done in the past. I also would not put it past her to take my computer to a computer expert to discover what may exist on the system.  I used to use Yahoo Messenger and archive old messages.  I have deleted the archived messages.
I have always cleared history and cache files in my internet browser, but I understand that may not be enough.  If that is not enough to cover up past tracks, what can I do now to cover up past tracks?  Any help or info is appreciated.

Go to Download.com and download a program called Spybot - Search & Destroy 1.2, easy to use, lots of options. I've been using it for a long time, works great, and it's free!

cyberscrub is a good program, use after
each computer session.

The only way to 100% eliminate what is on your ocmputer is to take out the hard drive and smash it into little pieces.  There is a lot of software out there to clean your computer, but NOTHING can clean it up 100%.  This past spring there were news stories about govenment computers being resold, they thought they had wiped all info off of the computers, but in the story they showed how easy it was to pull up info they thought was gone off of the computer.  So, if the goverment can't successfully wipe a hard drive - neither can we.

It's quite possible to recover deleted info, and moreover, some stuff may not have been deleted (because you never knew it existed).

It is possible to delete info well enough that your wife could not recover it for a practical amount of money, while, for example, the NSA could read it at will.  The main problem for the level of deletion you need, is that you may not be aware of everything you need to remove.

Clearing your cache, wiping info, basically everything intended to cover up something you have already done (even one moment ago) is probably useless against spyware type programs.  Also, don't assume you can tell if there is spyware already installed.

Considering your questions, my recommendation would be to replace the hard drive with a new one and destroy the current drive (Perhaps mangling it with a sledge hammer before tossing it in a public trash can.  That should be done with your own hands to be sure it is done).

Assuming you will need help replacing the drive, here are two suggestions on how to do that:

1) bring the computer to a repair shop and pay them to replace the hard drive.  Tell them it has been acting flaky, and you don't care if they can't find anything wrong with it, just replace it anyway.  Make sure they don't just copy your old drive onto a new one, but rebuild it as though the old drive was destroyed.

2) Wreck the drive so it needs to be replaced.  Maybe break some pins on the connector.  (You still need to physically, visibly  destroy the drive).

If you don't trust the repair shop to not copy your drive, not snoop it, not let your wife pick it up, etc, ask them to remove it before you leave the store and then take it with you.  General Nanosystems is a good shop, and they'll do it in front of you while you wait.

This is kind of drastic, yes it is, but my assumption is that getting caught would really mess up your life.  Replacing the hard drives and never accessing secrets from home is the easiest way (least chance of doing it wrong and leaving something).

I don't have any experience with the available spyware detection programs, because they would be useless against sufficiently advanced spyware.  Some of them are probably real good against the type of program your wife might use.



-- Modified on 9/4/2003 9:34:54 PM

I have my own computer business.  I can replace your hard drive for you.  It is really not too bad of a job and not all that expensive.  Email me at [email protected] if you would like to discuss further.

Same here in the TC area.  [email protected]

Try www.anonymizer.com for information on anonymous web surfing, spyware detection, and hiding your tracks.  They sell products and services and support.  The guys who run it are ultra-paranoid, anti-big-brother freaks.  If you are doing it from work and you have other people running you networks, then the network admins can see everything you do, but you can encrypt all your transmissions with secure tunneling SW and services from anonymizer.  I am sure other companies exist, but this is the one I use and I am happy with them.

JAP is also a good anonymous browsing product, and does offer protection from your local network admins and ISP.  And it's all free.  It won't do any good against someone who installs a snoop program on your computer, but will make it hard for anyone else to know where you're surfing and for webservers to know your internet adress.

http://anon.inf.tu-dresden.de/index_en.html



-- Modified on 9/6/2003 3:07:12 PM