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Spyware is also known as Adware or Malware. They do all sorts of bad things and have become rampant on the Internet. They are similar to viruses but get a special nudge away from the anti-virus vendors by having the stated purpose of tailoring your web searching habits for some advertiser. In reality they should be called Sleazeware in our opinion.

The list of horrors is long and complex. But he basics are: There are many of them nowadays and when they infest your computer they will most often eventually render it mostly unusable through pop up ads, changing you home page in your browser, conflicts with all the competing versions the advertising world wants to put on your machine and generally are a nuisance. At their worst they often also include things like key loggers that try to steal passwords, credit card numbers and such.

A few "best practices" ideas are:

	Anything that asks you something like "Do you want to download and install..." the answer is emphatically NO! unless you are absolutely sure that you want it.
	Get a good spyware scanner like Ad Aware or Spybot. They are free and very good. Treat them like an anti-virus program and update them regularly. Scan often because this problem is becoming as prevalent as spam or viruses.
	Avoid sleaze like porn sites. We do not care about morality here. It is just that these sort of sites are prime sources. If they were not great sources of Spyware, we would not mention them.
	Read the End User License Agreement (EULA) especially for anything you download. If it mentions advertising we would suggest not installing it.

If you do get infected try one of the spyware scanners mentioned above. If they cannot fully correct the problem also download and install the most excellent freeware program HijackThis. The output of that program will greatly assist a professional in diagnosing and removing this junk. Be sure to read the instruction carefully though.

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This page last updated on 07/10/2004