[AT] Do you have HotBar on your computer?

[Phil Auten]

Arthur,
This is good info. As with anything like this Hotbar program, beware of 
Greeks bearing gifts.
I have fixed two barely operational systems for friends with AdAware and 
their own antivirus
software. They simply had no idea how to use the antivirus program that was 
already installed
on their systems. One had only 47 spyware programs running and the other 
one had 61.
Both had viruses which I cleaned first, but the spyware stuff used up so 
much of their system
resources that there was little left to run what they wanted to use.
Keep your guard up!

Phil

At 12:09 PM 05/23/2004, you wrote:
>Hello gang,
>
>A few months back, maybe as long as 9 months or more, someone sent me 
>several email messages with a URL at the bottom advertising a free utility 
>called HOTBAR. It was suppose to have wonderful things in it and smiley 
>faces and so on.
>
>(I know there are some computer Gurus out there who already know this, but 
>there are a lot more users out there that don't!)
>
>Well, I finally downloaded HOTBAR. I wasn't totally unhappy with it so I 
>let it remain on my IE main page. Little did I realize it had spyware 
>imbedded in it. It uses Data Miner to glean information from your hard 
>drive and send it to entities that use the info for goodness knows what.
>
>There was an article in toady's newspaper that talked able how "SpyWare" 
>can and will slow down your computer operation. I had a spy ware 
>locator/killer downloaded, "ad-aware", but hadn't installed it. I 
>installed "ad-aware" free version this morning and it found 138 spyware 
>items and 130 + or - were HotBar using Data Miner. I set ad-aware to work 
>deleting the spyware items and my computer, which was running so slow I 
>was about to trash it, livened right up. I have since uninstalled HotBar.
>
>The point being, if your computer is running slower than it should, it may 
>be choked up with spyware inquiries. If you're running HotBar, I'm sure it 
>is and your are freely issuing personal data to the internet.
>
>Do with this information what you will. I'm just passing along an 
>experience of mine.
>
>Have a good one,
>Arthur

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