Dangers of Screensavers

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Danger: Screensavers Come With Strings Attached
Thu Sep 7, 2006 1:50PM EDT
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What could be more innocuous than downloading a screensaver to dress up your PC? "Well, the reality is that screensavers are some of the riskiest pieces of software that you can download to your computer," says Shane Keats of McAfee, Inc., makers of a variety of PC protection software.

Keats says, that while serious techies know they shouldn't download screensavers from the web, there are 15 million screensaver web searches each month. Those who end their search with a download are likely to find adware, spyware, or worse tagging along for the ride.

McAfee found the most dangerous screensaver this summer was Miami Vice, and that sites offering baseball or World Cup soccer downloads also were high on the risk list.

Story from Yahoo

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i could really never understand what the advantage of a 'screensaver' is , never installed one .
hbg

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I put mine in stand by.

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There's No Such Thing As a Free Lunch.

TINSTAFL.

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"Free" screensavers and smilies are often used as a tempt to the younger element of socitey. The purveyor then installs malware in to the computer in addition to the screensaver/smilie.

A company to AVOID in this connection is FunWebProducts and it's offshoots.

Screensavers are useful if you have a CRT monitor but not really necessary for TFT/flat screen monitors.

Edgar .... how are you getting on with your other thread and fixing the troubles?

E

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Wouldn't have a screensaver on any of my machines. All of my 'puters are on pretty much 24/7, set to douse their displays after 15 minutes of inactivity, and to go into standby after another 45 minutes of inactivity. My scheduled apps are set to wake the machine if necessary, and they're all configured to "Wake on LAN" so I can access any of them over my network whenever I want to.

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Equaliser wrote:

"Free" screensavers and smilies are often used as a tempt to the younger element of socitey. The purveyor then installs malware in to the computer in addition to the screensaver/smilie.

A company to AVOID in this connection is FunWebProducts and it's offshoots.

Screensavers are useful if you have a CRT monitor but not really necessary for TFT/flat screen monitors.

Edgar .... how are you getting on with your other thread and fixing the troubles?

E

I haven't had any incidents lately, since I ran ad-aware, bot check and registry scan programs.

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Dangers of Screensavers

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