The developers of a free tool called Detekt say they can find out if someone is spying on your Windows computer. It scans your computer for known surveillance spyware.
They site the huge growth in the use of surveillance technology in recent years that allow governments and other individuals to read you e-mail, monitor you conversations and possibly turn on your PC’s camera and microphones with you realizing it.
Now, they offer no guarantees that Detekt will find any and all surveillance spyware on our computer, but they feel it does a pretty good job.
You can download it at ressistsurveillance.org.
You must be able to run your computer with administrator rights to use the software. When you open Detekt, make sure to choose Run as administrator. For an XP computer, just click to open. But if you’re online with an XP computer, there’s no real protection for that operating system. But I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are checking to find out if you were previously spied on back before you took your XP computer offline when security support ended.
Then pick a language. You can choose between English, German, Italian, Spanish, Arabic and Amharic. The choose Scan now.
The scan will start and may take some time to complete because it’s checking your entire computer.
Detekt will let you know the results of the scan and generate a log file of what it found. Detekt cannot remove the surveillance malware. You’ll have to contact a trusted security professional about that and you should probably notify the police. Detekt is capable of finding a false positive, so it’s important to check with a professional. Detekt does list some resources to turn to on their website.
Detekt suggests saving the log that detected the surveillance malware somewhere other than the computer and immediately shutting it down until you can have it checked out. If you truly are infected with surveillance malware, someone could be monitoring your every keystroke, reading all your communication and even listening or watching you.
Note: Detekt is not yet compatible with Windows 8.1
~ Cynthia
“But if you’re online with an XP computer, you must not be too concerned about being spied on, since there’s no real protection for that operating system. But I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are checking to find out if you were previously spied on back before you took your XP computer offline.”
That was a rather snide and pointless comment to include in an article. I’ve been reading Worldstart articles and emails for years and have noticed this trend in the articles lately. I feel compelled to say something as it seems so unprofessional and not becoming of a site that seems dedicated to educating its visitors rather than beating them with an elitist IT “I know more than you” attitude.
I don’t like the trend in privacy loss and I don’t share my information online so please, Cynthia, stop assuming that everyone is blase about sharing information. (I know my grandmother believed that she was not putting ANYTHING on the internet and was instead allowing others to see on her screen only when she had it on. She had no idea that anyone could see anything on their own computers about her.)
Something like this has really illustrated for us how open our computers are for privacy violations. Keep the good informational articles coming and continue teaching us how to use the stuff we might never see. (Just do so professionally with an eye to your old readers.)
Sorry if you took it as snide. I meant it to be blunt. XP is just not safe to use online under any circumstance.
It dosen’t support windows 8.1 I guess you forgot to mention that.