I read this in an article by Michael C. Barnes. There are computer viruses; spam, pop-ups and a lesser-know thing called “Spyware.” Most people buy software that protects them from computer viruses.
Spyware is software that resides on your computer and runs in the background. It uses a back channel on the Internet to send private information out to advertisers who pay for this information.
Spyware reports what web sites you have visited, how many times, when, and it can even send out information that you put into forms. There is almost no limit to the information that spyware collects off you your computer.
Open source software is free and its source code is available for inspection. Downloads from such sites as download.com or other free download sites might be a combination of the program you expect and unexpected program that installs on your computer and sends out information in the background.
One example of spyware is “Gator”, which bills itself as a program that helps you remember data that you use to fill in forms. It sounds good, convenient and easy but Gator sends some of this data about you and your wants, desires and habits out to advertising networks and also automatically updates itself.
“Hotbar” is a program that adds graphical skins to Internet Explorer. This program not only monitors your browser clicks, it also creates a channel for graphics, email and advertising to come into your computer.
“Xupiter” is a spyware package that adds a search button to your IE tool bar that uses its own advertiser supported search. It also adds a list of bookmarks to your bookmarks and changes your home page.
“Top Text” from “Ezula” changes the links on your current web page to link back to advertisers paying to direct unsuspecting users to a particular keyword. Ezula creates a hot link to certain words on the text of a web page and underlines these in yellow. If you click on this link, you will be taken to an advertiser paying for you to be hijacked to their site.
Many of the advertisers engaging in this sort of low-live advertising are selling pornography and adult material. People are being directed to a pornographic site while doing research.
“Top Text” has been historically linked to Kazaa as early downloads of Kazaa automatically installed Top Text.
Some spyware blocks banner ads and other legitimately sponsored advertising and replaces it with banners from advertiser’s paying to have their banner ads displayed instead. This is one of the biggest threats of spyware because in order for people to continue to enjoy free web content, advertisers must feel confident that their paid ads will reach the people coming to the web sites they sponsor.
Some hackers have dropped spyware into legitimate programs and try to collect sensitive information such as passwords and credit card numbers by having this data sent over a back channel.
Manually removing spyware is not easy. The spyware does everything it can to hide itself from the user. Many web sites have published instructions how to find and remove individual spyware packages. One site that has a lot of useful information is scumware.com.
There is a very good free software package that you can download to remove most spyware from your computer. The software is called “Ad-aware.” Ad-aware’s free package will remove existing spyware from your computer. Commercial versions of Ad-aware will prevent spyware from getting into your computer and will monitor the activities of programs on you computer to insure no sensitive information is being sent out of your computer.
Ad-aware can be download from Lavasoft’s web page at www.lavasoft.de
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