Two high school students got fed up enough with a spyware program that they've joined a class action lawsuit bid against the program – and ended up becoming the case's prime researchers, Wired has reported.
Identified only as Carlino and Cross, the two teens told the magazine they were each infected with Xupiter about a year ago, without agreeing to or authorizing its installation. "We just found it on our PCs," Carlino said. "We were furious and frustrated. After trying for hours to manually delete Xupiter – a difficult task for even PC experts – we turned to Web forums for advice."
And, learned about the class action suit while getting advice on purging the pestiferous program. The suit is expected to be filed this week, according to Wired.
Although the "mothership" Website and program seems to be receding into the cybervoid, enough copycat versions exist to continue creating headaches, enough that Carlino and Cross finally got down to smoking out information about the original program's creators.
Xupiter is said to attach itself to Microsoft Internet Explorer's toolbar and, once active, changes users' designated homepages to Xupiter.com, or redirects all searches to that homepage, and blocks any user attempt to reset the original IE settings, according to Wired. The program also tries downloading its own updates every time an infected computer boots up and has been known to cause system crashes, the magazine added.
Later versions are also said to inject things like gambling games which turn up in popups.
The program is also known to arrive in some peer-to-peer network programs and is often offered for download on various Websites, though a lot of users, according to Wired, claim they never gave permission for Xupiter to arrive on their machines.
"Judging by the 25,000-some odd posts on SpywareInfo alone," Cross told the magazine, "I'd say quite a few people are pretty ticked off about Xupiter. And we've been told that hundreds of people every week want to get in on the lawsuit."
