Spyware

Nowadays lots of programs come in to our computers as unwanted visitors. Especially if you are a hefty Internet user. But its very irritating to know there are programs that use your computer without your permission or knowledge, and try to accumulate our private information and use our own computer resources to relay it to someone else. Spywares does this.

Spywares come in the Trojan horse category of the viruses. Spywares are distributed mainly through the Internet, via freeware downloads or through underground hacker sites. Spywares are also sometimes bundled along with some commercial software, as a means to track the usage of the software and collect data regarding the user.

Spyware Who uses it?

All of us has access to a spyware. The internet is the biggest arsenal for spyware programs. Even though anybody can get a spyware program, mostly users fall under one of these.

• Spywares are used by marketing companies to collect data from your computer. This may include the URLs you visit, the products that you buy through internet and the emails that you send. Spywares track all these details and send it back to the company.
  
  
• Spywares are used by your friend, your parents, your spouse or anybody to monitor your online activities.
  
  
• Spywares are being used by companies to monitor your acivities while at work.
  
  
• Spywares can be used by hacking and cracking groups to monitor your activities and get your passwords.
  
  
• Spywares can be used by underground mafias to get your credit card number, bank account information, passwords etc.

What all kinds of spywares are there?

The term Spyware can broadly be defined as any program that is intentionally hidden to make sure the user does not intervene with its functioning. Hence spywares can be of numerous types. Some of most important spywares are listed below.

• Spywares can be key loggers. A key logger is a type of spyware that is used to monitor all the keys that are being pressed in a computer. These spywares optionally sends email to person who spies on you with reports on all the keys typed.
  
  
• Spywares can be adwares. Adwares are spyware programs used to display popup ads when you least expect it. They also communicate with a remote server to send reports and other data.
  
  
• Spywares can be browser hijackers, which install browser helper objects. These types of spywares are used to monitor the URLs that you type, among many other things.

How can I clean my system and remove all the spywares?

If you are a very hefty Internet user, and if you always find new websites, chances are you have some sort of a spyware installed in your system. Since spyware components maintain a constant data stream leading out from your computer to a wide range of marketing companies to earn money for themselves at our expense it is vital for us to remove them to keep our personal data, files and information secure as these open data streams leave your computer with personal information vulnerable to attacks by hackers. How can you clean the spywares installed in your system?

To clean your system, the first and the foremost thing to do is to identify the spywares installed in your system and permanently remove them from your system. Let us see how you can do it.

• Download a very good spyware scanner.
  
  
• Scan your harddisk for possible spyware using the scanner.
  
  
• Update the scanners database files regularly.
  
  
• Some of these Anti spyware software can detect the presence of spyware in your system by scanning the hard disk for possible spyware in the system.
  
  
• Using these software you can also remove spyware from your system.