Today 9 out of 10 Internet subscribers unknowingly have some form of spyware, also known as adware, running on their computers.
Spyware monitors user activity and is capable of gathering and transmitting personal information over the Internet to the author of that spyware. Such personal information may include a history of web pages visited, e-mail addresses and even passwords and credit card numbers. It can also cause system crashes, monitor your keystrokes and eat up system resources along with Internet bandwidth.
Spyware is installed onto the users computer often as a bundled application. Such as Internet Explorer is bundled with the Windows operating system, so to Spyware can be bundled with that pear-to-pear program or flying monkeys program you recently installed.
It can be loaded into system memory at boot up, run in the background as a separate program from the host program it was originally installed with, collect your data and transmit it to a remote location on the Internet without your knowledge. This characterizes a Trojan virus in theory but virus detection software will not recognize it because it was most likely installed under the user license agreement along with the program that it was installed or bundled with. Ever read the fine print of the user license agreement?
Care or dont care, thats your decision, but for those that do care than lets get empowered with spyware detection software that is capable of detecting this junk; so we can have the option to remove it if we wish. Caution though; removing it may cause your flying monkeys program to quit working.
Why use software to scan and remove it? Ive removed this stuff by hand in the past and even for the most experienced puter techi it is a very tedious task and if blundered can result in damage to the operating system. Ive removed viruses by hand and dont see a difference between the two, really.
You can search for spyware detection programs at software websites such as downloads.com or tucows.com among many other places on the net. Some offer a free trial and or are limited in functionality, but the basic limited free option is primarily what I have used and am happy with since they still do cover all of the spyware definitions.
Two of these programs Ive used are located at: http://www.webroot.com/wb/products/spysweeper/index.php and http://www.spychecker.com/
And you can find a wealth of information on this topic by searching da great bIg WWW
Peace
