The XXX games

Got your own spyware horror story?

A few years ago, I bought the Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force expansion pack, which was bundled with GameSpy Arcade. Being young and naive, I installed it, and enjoyed meeting people around the world while playing multiplayer games. However, after some time, pop-up windows with adult content invaded my screen. It turns out that when a hole in GameSpy's system also tore open a hole in Windows, I was hit by a few drive-by downloads that took swipes out of Norton on top of installing adware.

I tweaked Msconfig and blew away unknown programs in RegEdit to get my system to a state where I could back up games, images, and programs before reformatting the hard drive. Since then, I've been keeping nearly all my important data backed up to a hefty secondary drive and backing up important user settings and data before rebuilding my machine every three to six months.

Now I only access sites I can trust, and for an extra measure, I set up my machine as dual-boot between 2000/XP and Linux after each backup and rebuild.

-Al
Riverina, Australia

Reply from the Download.com editors:

You may have been hit by the Nimda virus, which has been suspected to have shipped with version 1.09 of GameSpy Arcade. Nimda corrupts files, initiates mass mailings, spreads itself as an Internet worm, and leaks onto LAN networks to infect other machines. However, it's not known for generating pop-ups.

That trouble may have been from GameSpy Arcade itself, which does serve ads, which a careful reading of GameSpy's end-license user agreement (EULA) reveals (see Section 5, point B). However, it isn't clear that this advertising includes adult content. The advertising component might explain why more than one site accuses GameSpy Arcade for adware bundling, and the site itself earns a "yellow" McAfee Site Advisor risk rating, meaning proceed with caution. In your case, you just might have been unlucky.

Partitioning your drives and using external drives as backup storage are two solutions you mentioned for storing data you want to protect from malware. A free backup program such as SyncBack will schedule file transfers, saving you time and manual toil. An online backup system such as Carbonite Online PC Backup automatically stores your files online, so you don't have to manage extra external drives.