I encountered some very strange spyware yesterday (or so I think!). One of the executives here had a problem with his laptop: Any time he entered a site that didn't exist, instead of coming up with a search page a-la MSN or Google, he would see a blank page. This was the case with either Firefox or Internet Explorer.

When I looked at the computer, I found that the blank search page wasn't really blank. If I "viewed source" I'd see what appeared to be a random comment in the form or . I found that when I used the PING command to ping a host that didn't exist (ex: xxx or apple) that I was always redirected to the same IP address, 206.207.85.33, which belongs to an organization called WestNet.Net.

I didn't have time to research the problem any furthur...the executive needed his laptop back and unable to determine what might cause host name lookups to be redirected like this, I reinstalled windows but I'm betting I'll see this problem again. Spyware is nasty stuff.