They found that switching to Firefox and installing PestPatrol reduced their spyware related help desk calls from “…six daily to about one a month.” Anne Saita of SearchSecurity.com writes:

Steven Gelfound had unintentionally helped create quite the quagmire. The 35 desktops within one unit of his organization were being inundated with an unmanageable number of pop-up ads. Then employees noticed their homepages redirected to unsavory sites, indicating the browser had been hijacked. Next, the machines’ host files and registries were involuntarily edited; no sooner was one version of spyware removed, then another hidden within systems emerged during a reboot.

Systems suddenly running tons of applications in the background slowed to a crawl. Then PCs began to crash. Within three months, each PC within the enterprise was loaded down with 200 new spyware programs — daily.

The cause of the escalation was already well known at the office. In fact, it was core to the business. Employees devoted most of their work days to checking out child porn.

Gelfound is IT director for the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, the organization founded by “America’s Most Wanted” host John Walsh to hunt down missing and abused children.

[Continue reading Case study: Hardcore Spyware Among The ‘Missing’]