subject: Know The Perils Of Spyware [print this page] One of the most important innovations that had happened to us was the invention of computers. It changed the traditional way we do things, making everything faster and instantaneous. With almost everything run by a computer, it has become a permanent and necessary fixture in our daily routine. But as always, good comes with the bad, and a lot of opportunists is manipulating the technology for their own end. And one product of this greed is Spyware, a program the gathers our personal information without our permission.
Although there are a lot of programs that are lying around waiting to pounce on your computer, experts say that Spyware is the main one to look out for. Hidden as an invisible attachment, it infiltrates our computer through the various downloads we do every day. It secretly attaches itself to the downloads to gain free entrance to our PC, and beware - once it gets in, it's tricky to get out.
The moment it gains entrance, it begins to gather our personal information and sell it to other businesses that are willing to pay big money for it. This kind of software is able to decipher the names and passwords we enter by tracking our keystrokes, and once they have the information they will sell it to companies who are willing to pay lots of money for it. Since they now know what sites we usually go to and what products we usually check, they will now modify their marketing tactics to suit our particular needs.
Spyware are difficult to detect, you won't see a window popping out of your screen telling you that there's a spyware on your system, what you will see would be more pop-ups even when your offline, you will also notice that your system is running slow and your computer will keep freezing.
Go to a computer software store and purchase a scanning software for Spyware as soon as you suspect that you have spyware on your PC. Avoid taking advantage of those "free" spyware scanning programs available online; you might find that the spyware you had removed had been "replaced" by their own version of the program.
But in the end, prevention is still the best medicine. It is still best to exercise caution when visiting unknown sites and to download files and software only from websites you can trust.
