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Spyware on your PC

Do you get annoying banners that just pop up when you're using your PC? Have you noticed irrational activity on your system, such as Internet traffic when you don't have any applications open that could account for it? Does your browser act mysteriously at times, or show extra buttons it didn't have before? Perhaps you haven't noticed any of these things, but still the odds are that 9 out of 10 people reading this e-mail have on their computer one or more examples of something called Spyware.

Spyware is any software that runs inconspicuously in the background and collects information about your computer activities for the benefit of some third party. Almost always, the software is there without your knowledge, although you may have given legal consent for it to be there.

There are two basic categories of software, one for surveillance and one for advertising.

Surveillance spyware is used by law enforcement, industrial spies, jealous spouses, or corporations checking up on their employees. This software monitors and records your keystrokes or web activity, or occasionally captures an image of your monitor screen. That information is then either e-mailed to the spying party or hidden somewhere on your hard drive for later retrieval. It sounds insidious I know, but fortunately this is much less common than the other kind of spyware.

Advertising spyware doesn't want to 'catch' you at anything, it just wants to know all about you so that its masters can more efficiently promote and sell things to you. Different spyware programs will collect different information, which can include your web browsing history, on-line
Purchasing behavior, and an inventory of your computer hardware and software. And those are just the nice guys. Some spyware also collects more personal data like your name, age, sex, and the e-mail addresses of all the friends listed in your address book.

About now, you may be wondering how that spyware got on your machine in the first place, and what you can do about it. Well, if you are infected with surveillance spyware then somebody probably singled you out and installed it on your particular system, deliberately. For advertising spyware though, you most likely invited it by downloading some free software from the Internet or by using a file-sharing service such as Kazaa.

Haven't you ever wondered how a company can give away their programs or services for free and still stay in business? That's because their real product, the one that pays the bills, is Spyware. What's more, they probably asked your permission to put it on your system. It was buried somewhere in the License Agreement that nobody reads, and if you actually looked at it you might be surprised to find it gives them the right to do some pretty obnoxious things. And you clicked a button that said "I agree". Of course, that's assuming the spyware is at least this honest. Most are, but a few just install themselves without so much as a hint. Not surprisingly, these are the ones most likely to do things like copy your address book or look for credit card numbers and passwords.

So, what to do? The best thing is the same three-pronged approach that works for viruses - prevention, detection and cleanup. With a firewall running on the system, it will block some spyware, but not all. If you want to get 'free' goodies from the Internet or swap music without the nuisance of royalties, be aware that there is still a price to pay. Read those license agreements, and even if there isn't one make sure you know and can trust the source of whatever you are downloading.

For detection and cleanup, anti-spyware software is relatively new compared to anti-virus programs, but there are a couple of products we know well enough to pass on to you. These are: Ad-Aware (www.lavasoftusa.com/support/download/) and SpyBot S&D (http://security.kolla.de). Both programs are easy to install and use. What's more, both are free. Yes, we did say earlier that no software was truly free, but as far as we know neither of these programs install their own spyware. SpyBot asks for donations, and Ad-Aware counts on selling you an upgrade.

You might want to get both programs. If you have doubts, you can always use them to check on each other. In any case, neither of them is perfect and each one will catch things that are missed by the other. Both programs can remove most of the spyware that they detect, but there is one more thing you should know. You may find that your file-sharing or other 'free' software will stop working if you remove its associated spyware. In that case, you have a decision to make.