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Do you know which evil is residing on your PC?
WHILE connected to internet how many times have you found weird things happening to you, ranging from annoying pop-up windows appearing just out of nowhere to changing of homepage of your web browser, and to some unwanted link registering in your browser “Favorites.” Such activities definitely make your PC running slower than normal. All of these are signs that your computer is infected with harmful “spyware” or “adware.”
Spyware and adware are usually advertizing software that gets installed on your computer without your knowledge. Companies use these to pop-up ads on your computer, track your internet usage, and gather other personal information about you which is intended to track surfing habits in order to build marketing profiles.
Spyware and adware both perform the same function the basic difference between them is that spyware is installed on your computer, usually without our explicit knowledge that it transmits personal information to companies. But in case of adware we ourselves agree to install the software that brings adware to our system. This occurs while you agree to the installation conditions (which almost all of us accept without even reading). Usually the hidden program observes your surfing habits and forward this information back to the company’s website or it runs company’s ads on your system.
Spyware or adware programs, such as adbots, media plug-ins, backdoor santas, or trojans have several sinister abilities. Maybe they’ll just report what websites you visit or will send information back about the programs you use, which could be what songs you listen to, your surfing activities, etc. Some of these programs hijack your web browser so that you end up going to different websites than the one you intend to visit. At times you also find a pop-up advertisement executing randomly on your screen. Another things that these software do is that they can also download files, run programs in the background, and change your system settings, which can really harm your system.
In addition to violating your privacy and potentially damaging your system, spyware also slow your computer down by stealing processing time from the CPU. Encourage and enhance annoying pop-up ads and flashing banners and waste your valuable internet bandwidth.
Apart from this it’s an intolerable invasion of anybody’s privacy. Its like somebody has been asked to look over your shoulder while you surf, make notes of sites and products you view, put this info into a database, use this info to serve you annoying ads. Some famous names that also fall in this category are CometCursor, BonziBuddy, Alexa Toolbar, RealJukebox, SaveNow, and GAIN.
Spyware and adware are often confused with viruses, because each changes the behavior of your computer. Spyware and adware are generally not destructive as a computer virus might be. While spyware/ adware may keep track of your internet activities or cause dozens of pop-up ads to run on your computer, generally spyware is not aimed at doing malicious things to your computer it is only intended to serve some advertising purpose. Moreover, viruses are generally written by individuals but authors of spyware are mostly companies
The trend of high jacking a web browser by malicious websites and software is becoming more and more common where the browser settings of web surfers are being forcibly hijacked which modifies your default start and search pages. They also come under the category of spyware as they also track your surfing behaviour and are meant to serve ads.
Sometimes internet shortcuts are added to your favourite’s folder without your knowledge and consent. Every time your browser loads a page that doesn’t exist, you end up at some strange site, probably filled with popup ads. All this is done by browser hijackers and browser helper objects which are tools that knowingly or unknowingly alter the settings of your browser, or install helper objects to hijack data that your web browser relays. These activities are executed with a small file which is associated with your browser and resides in the registry of your system. This file is known as Browser Helper Object (BHO) which is a DLL that allows developers to customize and control Internet Explorer. BHOs have access to all the events and properties of that browsing session. They give developers almost complete control over Internet Explorer
Internet Explorer toolbars are also installed through these BHOs. Some of the more common browser extensions include the Gator, ISearch, Mirar, I-Lookup and Hotbar toolbars that are all a type of spyware as they are programs that deliver ads to their users and automatically monitor and report back to their home servers with information about where their users are travelling on the internet.
Google’s toolbar provides an alternative to these toolbars as it is free from any kind of spyware and has a manual customizable option that permits details of website visits to be sent to its home server so it can retrieve and display additional information about those websites. In any case you are using a browser other than Microsoft Internet Explorer, you will be safe from almost all the known browser hijackers.
Use of (Peer-to-Peer) P2P file sharing programs to download music files and software’s has become very popular in recent years, but for those of you who think downloading entertainment files (music and movies) and other software are free and they don’t have to pay any price, then you should think again as these networks are one of the major source of adware and spyware on internet.
The authors and distributors of the file sharing programs make money by means other than selling the product to consumers. Many of the most popular music and file-sharing programs, including KaZaA, BearShare, LimeWire, Morpheus, Grokster and iMesh, install adware and other small tracking programs on your system that serves custom ads and monitors your internet activities.
KaZaA, the most popular file-sharing program on the planet, installs numerous spyware/malware including Cydoor that manipulate the computer’s memory and user/system resources. These apps running in the background without the user’s knowledge quite often lead to conflicts, crashes, and general system instability.
These apps then go on to steal the users’ internet connection’s bandwidth to send this information back to its creators. Ad-aware and Spybot can remove Cydoor, but KaZaA and many other programs won’t run without.
Few file-swapping software’s like WinMX, Shareaza, E-Mule have been found not to have any spyware or other advertizing parasites bundled into them. Even if you are interested in using the P2P network for downloading files you should go for Kazaa Lite and Grokster Lite. These are cracks of the original software and are free from spyware programs.
Cookies are small text files, of size of few kilobytes that websites save to a computer’s hard drive. Many cookies merely store settings about how you use particular sites, without cookies, browsing becomes a much less convenient experience. You’d have a lot more typing and memorizing to do without them. The website that created the cookie is responsible for disclosing to you what is in the cookie and what the cookie is for. This is usually done in a privacy statement posted on the website.
They don’t generally fall in the category of spyware and are not as harmful but they also represent a threat of lost privacy as general purpose of cookie is to keep logs of your surfing across multiple sites, combine that data with several marketing databases, and to build detailed records of what you read and what you buy.
Even if you discover your computer has a spyware or adware application installed, it can be hard to remove from your machine as they are mostly written in such a way that even if you delete it, it will reinstall itself, so you need a program specifically developed for removing these files.
Many anti-spyware and -adware applications can be found at public software library websites and are available for free. Spybot and Ad-aware are the most popular of them. These are general-purpose tools designed to scan for and remove a wide variety of malicious software (including spyware, adware, dialers, and browser hijackers).
Spybot is generally more powerful and more aggressive, but Ad-aware is easier to use it is recommended to use both of them for detecting and removing spyware as sometimes when one tool fails to remove all the malware on a system, the other tool will finish the job. When running either tool, it is essential that they be updated to include the latest patches and scanning databases. Like antivirus software, these tools can only scan for malware that they know how to identify. The above mentioned utilities can be downloaded for free from
Much trouble caused by adware and spyware is avoided just by following a few simple steps some good rules to follow include:
Adjust the security settings in Internet Explorer or any other web browser(s) you use so that they prompt you before downloading ActiveX controls, as most of the malicious software from the web gets installed through ActiveX controls, changing these settings will cause a dialogue box to pop up any time that a website tries to install an ActiveX component on your browser. The purpose of changing this setting is simply to stop ActiveX components from installing themselves without your knowledge or consent.
Although the firewall does not remove or detect spyware and hijackers, it restricts spyware by prohibiting its access the internet, for instance, if you happen to get a trojan that attempts to broadcast your computer’s information to some remote server, the firewall will alert you and stop that action.
For home users Zone Alarm is an excellent, free firewall available for download from
One of the most important thing to remember is that you should also regularly update your Windows operating system with latest security patches and bug fixes for both Windows and Internet Explorer. You can do this by visiting Windows Update and by enabling Automatic Updates. Similarly, make sure to update your antivirus and anti-spyware software with their latest definitions.
Avoid visiting and downloading software from warez sites, as it’s the warez sites and other corrupt websites that are known for spreading malicious spy and hack ware. Some websites try to trick you into installing adware or spyware, so don’t go on clicking mindlessly on everything you come across. If you are unsure about a program run a search for it on
The writer
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