Can spyware stop your internet working?

[Vegeta]

Hi, my friend's internet stopped working, i'm going round tomorrow to see what the problem is.
But basically he phoned up telewest and they claim its spyware, my friend claims he has no unusual stuff on his pc, no popups, no slowdown, no random programs in his start menu.
Can the telewest guy be right or is he just using that as a excuse as hes too stupid to find the real problem?

 

[bledd]

Can the telewest guy be right or is he just using that as a excuse as hes too stupid to find the real problem?

does your friend know what he's talking about?

does he have a wireless router? -noobs pressing the reset button is a lot of the fixes i've gotta do, lol

disabled network connection (easy to overlook)

 

[modo77]

yes it can. mainly because its using all your upstream bandwidth you won't get anything down

 

[VaderDSL]

i find if something messes with the hosts file that the interent can become very flakey

 

[Uhtred]

spyware can completely break winsock.

 

[The_KiD]

Short answer is Yes, yes it can.

Just because your friend has not had popups doesnt mean anything, u dont always see the affects of the bugs on your system.

However that doesnt mean this is deffinitely spyware though.