I was asked recently for more information on how WinPatrol was created and why. I thought some of you here might also be interested.

It started (Nov 97) when I was caught by a Trojan/worm designed to collect AOL passwords so they could use AOL accounts to send out porn spam. Customer support for America Online advised me I would have to format my hard drive. That's when I decided to create WinPatrol so I could clean up my system and prevent any future infiltrations. At first I gave WinPatrol to friends and family. I considered making it shareware but eventually decided it was important and put it up online for free.

I like to be a little different so I decided to make WinPatrol something I called "Birthdayware".
On my birthday, (April 24th) when you ran WinPatrol a message would appear that said something like, "Today is BillP's Birthday. If you like WinPatrol feel free to wish him a happy birthday at BillP@billp.com.".
You can not imagine how much fun it was the first year when Emails started to flow in on April 23rd and I first realized how many fans we had around the world. For a few years, I grew old celebrating my birthday with hundreds of joyful Emails. Many folks went to the trouble of creating animated greeting cards online.

All the changed when WinPatrol's popularity grew along with the increase in online threats. Not only was the Email too much to handle, my spam grew exponentially with the number of greeting cards sites who obtained my address from well meaning users. The final blow was the irony of going to retrieve a greeting card only to be told I would have to download Gator before I could view my card!
I had to remove the Birthdayware message and was forced to give up my old Email address.

Two years ago I decided to create the online database of program information to help people understand both the good and bad programs on their system. Our users were curious about programs like dumprep, ctfmon and rundll32. I created a one time membership fee for WinPatrol PLUS because I knew I needed help in doing the research and figured the membership also allowed folks to show their support. The only difference between free and PLUS continues to be access to our information online.

Thanks!
Bill

In the story of Scotty's birth I didn't elaborate on the details of my first experience with having my system compromised. The feeling of being violated is something I'll never forget and continues to motive me to help others with similiar problems.

It came in the form of an attached .txt file from someone I had worked with at AOL appeared to have sent.
I didn't open it immediately and saved it to my hard drive.
A little while later, I was curious so I opened Explorer and clicked on the .txt file.
As many of you may remember, when a file was too large for Notepad, Windows would offer you the option of opening the text file with WordPad.
As soon as I clicked "Yes" to open with WordPad I knew I was screwed.

WordPad of course supported OLE(ActiveX) components which immediately started to execute this damn control which created three separate .exe's on my system. Each program had the ability to duplicate any of the other applications if they were deleted.

One of the applications would capture any passwords you typed and sent them off to a temporary Email account.
Another would capture your AOL buddy list and Email itself out to everyone it found.
The third would restore the auto start entries if they were removed.

One autostart was in the Run registry, one was put in the Startup folder and the other was in the WIN.INI file.
The one in the INI file was proceeded by a hundred blank spaces so if you just looked at your win.ini and didn't have word wrap on you'd never see the entry.

Bill,
Thanks for your story! It is quite interesting. When I read something like this, I think of two things: 1. There are so many computer users, like myself, who are just average people and would find themselves in a hopeless mess if something like this happened to them; and, 2. I think how fortunate we are that people, like yourself, take on the task of offering a program like WinPatrol to help people like us! WinPatrol is the first program I have found that actually explains in layman's terms what a particular program or application is and what it does, and it really enables me to make as intelligent a decision as possible about whether to keep that application or not.
As you can tell, I really like WinPatrol Plus--keep up the good work!

Agreed! Great story and great service to the computer defense community.

Bill - Thanks for the interesting history of your product. I added Winpatrol as part of my up front protection about two months ago and recently became a plus member. Keep up the good work.

thanks for the history info Bill,winpatrol is my favourite programme of all.

Very cool life he has!!
and love the scotty doggie