Spyware and Adware are software technologies that collect information about a person or an organization without their knowledge or consent. This information is commonly used to target advertising to that individual or organization. Spyware and Adware can be divided into two categories. The first category is associated with the cookies that are stored on your computer. I call this passive Spyware and Adware.
Cookies are small, text files that contain information that can enhance our Internet browsing experience by allowing us to customize views and to remember certain information so we don't have to constantly re-enter it. Cookies are used for online shopping carts and wish lists. Cookies can also be used to track our web browsing habits, which most people consider an invasion of privacy. The amount of information available from cookies is fairly limited and can usually be obtained by other means, so I don't consider this passive threat to be very significant.
Active Spyware and Adware is a much more significant and pervasive problem. Active Spyware and Adware are applications, applets and browser helper objects that are running on your computer! Since they are running on your computer, they have complete access to all of the information contained on your hard drive. These programs collect information and report it back to the advertisers, which allows them to tailor and target advertisements. Not only are these programs an unconscionable invasion of your privacy, but they are also robbing you of performance. These malicious programs are consuming disk space, memory and CPU cycles from your computer to do their dirty work. This competition for resources will cause your computer to run slow, and may even make it unstable.
So how does this malware get on our computers? In many cases, these programs are disguised as helpful utilities or games that can be downloaded and installed for free. Comet Cursor provides animated cursors to enhance a user's Internet experience, but they also install Spyware and Adware as part of the package. Those cute Outlook and Outlook Express extensions for dressing up email are another well-known source of Spyware and Adware. Browser helper objects, like custom search bars, can also be a source of Spyware and Adware. Applets that sit in the system tray and provide active news and weather feeds may be a source of Spyware and Adware. In many cases, the well meaning user has been tricked into installing the malicious software, but there are also cases were the perpetrators of this software use security flaws in Internet Explorer to install ActiveX components when the user clicks on a webpage.
To protect your computer from this rapidly growing threat, I highly recommend that you download and install a Spyware and Adware scanner. No savvy computer user would go online without a virus scanner, but a virus scanner doesn't protect against Spyware and Adware. You need a separate scanner. There are several free options available. I choose to go with Spysweeper by Webroot.
Once you have downloaded and installed a Spyware scanner, you may have to run it several times to clean up your computer. Spyware and Adware are tenacious and may reinstall themselves after they have been removed. I recommend rebooting between scans to help expedite the cleaning process. There is also a very good article available at the Microsoft Valuable Professionals (MVPs) website. They have a number of helpful suggestions that are easily implemented.Spyware scanners also monitor programs that start automatically when your computer reboots or when you log on. This is a necessary process to catch Spyware and Adware, but it also has a side benefit. Many commercial programs will add applets and applications to the startup process to enhance their services, but few users actually use these services which consume resources and reduce the stability of the system. Most Spyware scanners will detect new services added to the startup process and allow you to disable them, which gives the user greater control over their computer resources.
Spyware and Adware may also be contributing to the spam that fills our email inboxes. In the June/July issue of the Livewire, I wrote an article about some specific spam events that appeared to be coming from the Huntsville Section. A recent article in The Inquirer indicates the virus writers are now colluding with spammers. It doesn't take a leap of faith to conclude that commercial interests are bringing these miscreants of the Internet together to bombard us with advertisements. Running a Spyware scanner is no longer optional.
For additional information: