Saturday, March 14, 2009

Spyware: Get Protected

by: Ed Beatty

What’s Spyware? It is a vile and wicked program that gets installed by itself on your computer without taking your permission. You say that you don’t mind having this unwanted software on your computer. Now if I mention that this software can make your computer’s life hell in a way more than that the viruses are able to? Do you know Spyware has the capacity to create innumerable pop-ups, it may monitor your internet surfing and also spam your mail account with junk? It can also result in identity theft by collecting all your personal information. If you think you don’t possess Spyware and you will never be attacked by it, you are living in a make-believe world!

But how does a common computer user like you restrict the Spyware from monitoring your computer system? No worries, there are multiple ways that you can avail. For example, when you are attacked by the Spyware, you can remove it manually. However, if you are not an expert (not having any certificate) at computers, never try to remove Spyware by yourself. So we, the non-experts should utilize Spyware removal software because it doesn’t take much time to use it. The very software will detect the threats and remove Spyware.

Now comes the time for choosing the software. You can select from a plethora of programs. Two of the most popular programs are Lavasoft’s “Ad-Aware” and Spybot’’s “Search and Destroy”. These two comes free for your personal use. Lavasoft offers other professional solutions. There are other programs in the market as well which work in the same way the Spybot and the Lavasoft performs.

“Search and Destroy’ from Spybot blocks all the evil programs from getting installed with the aid of its immunity feature and also blocks the installations of programs that can threat your computer in case you use Opera or Internet explorer. This program also detects the ‘bad’ programs gathering your personal information and eliminates them.

You will multitudes of different services from “Ad-Aware” of Lavasoft. What are they? This program scans you computer’s registry, memory and hard drives for known Data-mining. It also searches for aggressive advertising which are incessant pop-ups, Parasites, Keyloggers which logs your passwords, Dialers, Trojans and Malware which is Spyware. Ad-Aware even detects Browser Hijackers whose work is to change your homepage and several other tracking objects that can be overlooked by your anti-virus software. It also offers a threat assessment of every bad program it has encountered.