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Greeting Card Spyware Threat Could opening a friendly greeting card be a problem? You bet! Would you be worried about opening a greeting card from a friend? There could be problems doing so if you don't know what company you are dealing with. There are many reputable greeting card companies out there but some greeting cards are now being used to send pornography, or to place porn images on the desktop, or to spy on you. In late 2002 a new technology emerged in which greeting cards are being used harvest the entire e-mail contact list of the recipient. When you receive the card you will be asked to load a plug-in. You will then see a lengthy "click-wrap" license that includes language in which you agree to let them download your contact list. Once they have your contact list everyone on your mailing list gets a greeting card from you. That sounds annoying but otherwise not too harmful, at least until you realize that the technology you have installed allows someone to monitor every keystroke, password, credit card number, etc. that you type. The underlying technology is from e-Mail PI. Their Website is an IP address with a non-standard home page name; you would never find it by accident. E-mail PI is tied in with a very high tech site named InfoStorm. We did feature links to Mail PI and InfoStorm. As of 02/04 these links ceased to function, and as of October 2005 they bring up a "search" page that spawns a number of advertisements, and that offers to sell you the domain. There are plenty of other schemes out there so be careful when opening any e-mail from someone you don't know. CNN Article PC Magazine Many of these greeting cards rely on Microsoft's Active-X technology to run programs on your computer. We recommed that you go to your browser's option window and change the Active-X settings to be their most restrictive.

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