Spyware Warrior

[mikey]

Can anyone jog the fog that litters my mind?

When/where did the first public discussion of spyware occur and what was it about? Were the ACF discussions the first?

What was the first anti-adware tool and when was it released? Was OptOut the first?

What was the first spyware found? Was it Aureate?
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W2K/2K3/XP/2K8/Vista/W7/RHE/DEBIAN/SUSE

Spyware/Adware is NOT freeware, it costs all of us dearly.

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[suzi]

Hmm... spyware trivia anyone? Except it's not a trivial topic by any means.

[paperghost]

The first recorded use of the term spyware occurred on October 16, 1995 in a Usenet post that poked fun at Microsoft's business model. Spyware later came to refer to espionage equipment such as tiny cameras.

[eburger68]

Mikey:

So far as I know you can find uses of the term "spyware" back in the mid-to-late 90's. Those uses of the term tend to refer to keyloggers and such.

Porn dialers being stealth-installed as ActiveX controls go back to 1996 -- I remember because I happened to be an OS/2 Warp user at the time, and I distinctly remember thinking, "Thank god I don't have to worry about that nasty business!" The term "spyware" wasn't being applied to porn dialers at that point.

I have heard that ZoneLabs was using the term "spyware" during the fall of 1999 in their advertising for the very first versions of ZoneAlarm, which provided only outbound protection, not inbound protection. ZoneAlarm was billed as a program that could help you control all the new programs with a penchant for phoning home, and ZoneLabs used the term "spyware" to describe these kinds of "chatty" programs. (ZoneAlarm didn't add inbound protection until version 2.0, which came out in the fall of 2000 and was heavily touted by Gibson on his ShieldsUp pages.)

For use of the term "spyware" in the sense that we use it now -- which is to say, to refer to unwanted advertising programs -- I usually date that to the spring of 2000, when people were starting to become aware of the very first adware modules from Aureate/Radiate and Conducent Timesink. Steve Gibson posted his OptOut pages in early summer 2000:

http://grc.com/optout.htm

Gibson also posted the story of his battle with RealNetworks over their intrusive NetZip-based RealDownloader shortly after his OptOut pages went up:

http://grc.com/downloaders.htm

His OptOut program came soon afterwards -- certainly by July 2000. There had been some amateurish hacks to remove Aureate/Radiate modules as far back as May 2000, and some of those hacks even removed legitimate Microsoft libraries with similar file names (false positives have been a problem for anti-spyware programs from the very get-go). But Gibson had the first proper anti-spyware program in the sense that we think of anti-spyware programs. It was very limited, targeting only Aureate/Radiate and Conducent Timesink, but it was an anti-spyware program.

Gibson had plans to take OptOut commercial and offer it for a small price, but Lavasoft came along by the end of summer 2000 with version 1.0 of Ad-aware. Lavasoft offered their program for free. Moeover, because their program was more fully developed and was already targeting a wider range of unwanted software at that point, Gibson bowed out and declined to develop OptOut any further.

There were other programs that targeted keyloggers and other system monitoring programs, but OptOut was the first anti-spyware program to target advertising programs as "spyware."

My memory could very well be flawed, though. On a side note, it would be interesting to get ahold of a version 1.0 of Ad-aware and take a look at it in the light of where anti-spyware programs are these days. I still have some of Lavasoft's 3.x versions, but I neglected to archive anything prior to that, unfortunately.

Best,

Eric L. Howes

[paperghost]

hi Eric, you are indeed right about Zone Alarm's very early use of the term Spyware

[TeMerc]

I ran into this tonite while looking for some resources of online databases of spyware. It says, about the first instance of the word 'spyware' was back in 1995: