Is it a single program? Where does it get installed? How do you know you’ve got it?
No, spyware is a general term for any multitude of programs that are installed either with or without your knowledge. It can be packaged with ‘free downloads’, or even with commercial software. There was spyware included with the installation disc for my comcast cable modem. You have to read your EULA’s carefully.
Spyware/adware can do many things, from keeping track of the sites you visit to forcing pop-up ads to appear on your system. They eat up system resources with the information they store on your computer and sent information about your browsing/shopping habits back to the software creator.
As for identifying whether you have spyware - if you surf the web you probably have some :g:
There are free programs for locating and cleaning spyware from your system. The two most highly-touted (and the ones I use myself) are Spybot SD and AdAware. Each program will catch some things the other one misses. Used in conjunction they do a great job of cleaning things up.
Make sure to run a scan every couple weeks, or more frequently if you are online a lot and make sure to check for updates for the definitions files frequently.
ID of spyware is the one and only good thing attributable to dial-up. When I start the machine, if something dirty is aboard, I see the dial-up window without having prompted it. When the machine is clean, it won’t do that.
If your computer suddenly starts “acting weird”- you see more pop-up ads or pop-up ads with more adult content, ZoneAlarm (or your software firewall of choice) shows a lot of new programs whose names don’t sound familiar trying to access the internet, your homepage has been changed and you can’t change it back, or the computer slows down a lot, you might have spyware. There are a lot of different kinds of spyware (and spyware evolves constantly to get around anti-spyware software, sort of like spam), so it’s impossible to point to one symptom and say that it is the infallible indicator of spyware.
The biggest giveaway is when it pops on a trenchcoat, hat, dark glasses and starts reading a paper with eye holes cut in it. Then you know you have spyware
sorry i couldnt resist.
Half the time you dont even know you hav eit on there, I got hit by a dialer the other week and my GF dialled on to it for 1 hour. Thats about a $200 phone bill that I have waiting for me next month.
Dont get over paranoid, getting over paranoid will just slow down and ruin your computer. My brother gets way too paranoid and has 3 different anti virus’s running plus personal firewalls and 3 different spyware programs. Needless to say it takes about an hour to do anything on his PC.
I just dont worry about it to be honest with you. I have AVG and spyware but dont run them often.
How does anybody benefit from knowing my surfing habits? Or, how could someone translate my surfing habits into money into their pockets? What’s so lucrative to someone knowing that I’ve visited hotmail, the Straight Dope, espn.com, nfl.com, snopes.com and yahoo.com for the past few days?
People that pay for ads like to target them to the appropriate interest groups. If you’re visiting espn.com and nfl.com, then you are presumably interested in sports and in particular football. Useful information for advertisers!
I think it’s important to know what’s running on your computer, and to periodically check to make sure there’s nothing new or unknown on there.
However, that’s not an easy task in windows, which hides a lot from you.
Myself, I periodically run HijackThis to take a look at everything that gets started at boot. Especially after installing some new program or after a porn session. Anything I don’t recognize usually shows up in a google search, for good or bad. After you go through it once, it’ll be easy to spot any changes after that.
As a side note, does someone know of a good “process lookup” site? Sometimes I have trouble because google doesn’t always give the best results when searching for a process name.
For spyware there’s sysinfo.org. It’s good for determining if a process is spyware or not, though it does have a blind spot for viruses.
Google is a good second choice: if a process comes up with no hits, it’s spyware. (It indicates a random filename – sysinfo gives no hits for random names, simply because they’re impossible to list).
I highly recommend Spyware Blaster. It automatically detects and blocks spyware. Since installing it, I only get maybe one or two hits when I run Ad-Aware every couple of weeks.