Outraged by the damage inflicted by a fast-spreading spyware application, a pair of high school students team up to fight back. Jay Cross Jr. and Christopher Carlino, two high school seniors from Stamford, Connecticut, are determined to track down the creators of Xupiter spyware software and take them to court.
Carlino and Cross recently signed on as participants in a pending class action suit against Xupiter, joining thousands of other disgruntled users whose machines were vandalized by the spyware. But the two teenagers weren’t content to simply join the suit. Carlino, 17, and Cross, 16, have become the primary researchers for the case, tirelessly ferreting out information about the creators of Xupiter and the havoc their software wreaks on computers.
“In the greater scheme of things Xupiter may not seem like a big deal, but we believe that people should care about the little everyday injustices,” said Cross. “Little problems can quickly turn into big issues.” Not that anyone who has had the misfortune of meeting Xupiter would classify it as a little problem.
Xupiter attaches itself to Internet Explorer’s toolbar. Once active in a system, it periodically changes users’ designated homepages to Xupiter.com, redirects all searches to Xupiter’s site, and blocks any attempts to restore the original browser settings. Xupiter also attempts to download updates each time an affected computer boots up, and has been blamed for causing system crashes. Several versions of Xupiter appear to download other programs, such as gambling games, which later appear in pop-up windows.
Xupiter arrives in some peer-to-peer programs, and is also offered for download from an ever-changing array of websites. But a significant number of users claim they never gave permission before the application was installed on their machines. And the program doesn’t allow itself to be easily uninstalled.
As of late last month Xupiter.com, the spyware’s mother ship, appeared to be inactive. But various mutations of Xupiter, lurking on sites such as xjupiter.com and orbitexplorer.com, continue to infest the computers of unwary users, as does Xupiter itself.
“Both of us became infected with Xupiter about a year or so ago,” said Carlino. “We neither agreed to nor authorized an installation of this software; we just found it on our PCs. 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.”
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