Microsoft AntiSpyware funny

Funny thing happened when I arrived at work this morning. I have Microsoft AntiSpyware (beta) running on my PC. It runs a scan every evening and generates a report as to what it found for me the next day. Running for weeks, there has been no spyware found (which should be no surprise — I am a network administrator and tend to be very cautious in my surfing!)

Imagine my surprise when I arrived this morning when I noticed the report of 1 spyware item found. This was especially troublesome since I hadn’t used my computer all weekend.

The spyware it found was called Pearl Echo (Remote Control Software), "an enterprise-class employee Internet monitoring, filtering and control software program."

After doing more digging, it turns out the suspicious item was a file called smptreg.vbs, a script file supplied by Microsoft used to manage event sinks that hook into the built in SMTP server.

Heal thyself, Microsoft!