Spyware & Malware
With a thesis on money laundering, a certain law student frequently used Google to find her online references. This easy tool was extremely useful to the student in her writing process. After working on the project for a short time, the student faced the annoyance of being directed to a site that had nothing to do with money laundering each time she typed specific key terms.
Her hopes of it being an easy to repair problem with the internet or the search engine were dashed as the glitch refused to go away, and she was forced to concede that she had likely been bugged. Whenever we are bothered by human annoyances, those are easily dealt with. Defending ourselves from the attacks of the adware and spyware that infected the student’s computer is harder to do. The law school student was definitely not an advanced student of technology, as she typically only used her computer for school related purposes of research and writing.
Unfortunately, her case was incredibly common, as there are many people who fall prey to harmful and annoying problems known as spyware and adware. The word ‘spyware’ was coined in 1995, though it was not until the year 2000 that it began seeing frequent use by the general populace. This refers to any software program or script which allows admission to the computer owner’s personal information.
This is done by studying logging keystrokes, web browsing history and even scanning a user’s hard drive. With the advent of spyware, infiltration moved off the big screen of Hollywood movies and into the homes of millions of unsuspecting individuals that can be taken advantage of at any time. The unsuspecting people targeted by these attacks are victims because nobody wants to have their private computer activities compromised. Spyware may help track criminals and their activities, but this type of program is used far more often for such vile activities as tracking credit card information from unsuspecting victims. It is simply irresponsible for anyone to be negligent in their use of a great anti-spyware program.
Ordinary people can protect themselves by blocking spyware and all other software programs similar to it like adware and malware. This is made easy by getting one of the many adware and spyware blocker programs that are available online. Disabling the harmful programs that are already in place is one function of these blockers, but so too is preventing any additional harmful programs that are similar in nature.
Viruses and worms manage to prevent regular computer usage by their self replication, but although spyware, adware and malware do not self replicate, they too can cause disturbances in the daily activities of computers. Frequently, the ‘harmless’ spying can result in slowing down the entire computer system so that running the system or any of its programs takes forever. Unfortunately for many computer owners, spyware programs can and do hide on their systems, causing havoc while being undetectable as the root of the problem. Fighting the problem before it starts, by installing a good blocker, is the way to go.
