Information About Adware Spyware, Malware & Computer Virus

The Internet and World Wide Web is a wonderful resource and is omnipresent. People spend a great deal of time online shopping, transacting business, looking for information, chatting etc.  Identity thieves have well understood the Internet yield a great potential as the ground to harvest financial and personal information of targeted victims.

Consider these facts:

"Every Three Seconds" someone's Identity is stolen.

“Jocelyn Kirsch, 22, and Edward K. Anderton, 25, were living a lavish lifestyle: trips to Paris and London; salon visits costing $1,700 each; a $3,000-a-month apartment in upscale Philadelphia. Kirsch and Anderton didn’t earn any of these luxuries — they stole money using a complex identity theft scam.” -Digital Journal

And their main tool? A mere $100 sypware program.

Aptly named, Spyware allows a criminal gangs to “sneak” into your computer , to take control of it  and steal their personal information . Spyware is also called as adware while in some cases has been labeled as malware.

Once installed in your computer, spyware starts monitoring each and every user’s computer and online activities. This obviously has a number of potentially harmful consequences.

In mild cases, spywares track a user's browsing habits in order to discover which advertisements to display based on the user’s preferences. This is a targeted advertising tactic. They may also initiate drive-by downloads (download that happens without knowledge of the user) to download and install some advertising components.

Spywares are equipped with key loggers which steal passwords. Online banking sites provide security only against somebody eavesdropping on the network traffic, and not against somebody eavesdropping on keystrokes. Stolen keystrokes reveal your credit card information, bank account details and what not!! Spywares are equipped even to scan the documents in user’s hard drive. The personal and financial information of the user gathered by the spyware are exactly what the Identity thieves are after. The user never know that he or she is being tracked and it is always too late when the realization dawns.

Some other potential consequences are that the spyware program can

•      Consume system’s resources without user’s knowledge leading to slowdown of computer

•      Change security settings of the system making it more vulnerable to other attacks

•      Install other spyware programs through  drive-by downloads

•       Reduce the user's ability to control his or her computer

There are also some unsolicited pop-ups that you may encounter while browsing that look like regular Windows system generated pop-ups. Clicking on these will cause you to unknowingly install unwanted spyware. Understanding these key factors about spyware, you definitely don’t want to be a victim of spyware infection.

Chief amongst the steps that has to be taken is to obtain reliable, reputed and effective anti-spyware software. By doing this, you can detect, eradicate already installed spyware/adware programs and also block new ones to enter your system. However, don’t trust all adware and spyware protection programs because some of them are to trick you to download and install an adware or spyware itself. As said before, some freeware programs contain spyware so be sure to read the EULA (End User License Agreement) before proceeding with installation.  It is worth mentioning that older versions of Internet Explorer are very vulnerable to spyware attacks because of tight coupling of IE and the Windows operating system.

Francistbk


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