Sunday, August 12, 2007

What Damage Spyware Can Cause? - Symptoms

By Sanjay Kak

You must be wondering, what is Spyware or Spyware Anti-Virus, and why it is important to have your computer scanned and updated with Spyware Antivirus software. With the rise of internet more and more users came on internet and gave rise to e-commerce benefiting users and commerce industry. With this it created problems related to user profiling and in some cases malicious attempts to intercept login and passwords for financial institutions. The word Spyware surfaced in mid 1990, right before dot com boom, it saw its use only when dot com boom created tons of companies on net and millions of user got hooked to internet.

In essence Spyware is computer program, job of this program is to collect information about user. The program is used for collecting information about users without their consent.The computer program secretly records user's actions, while user is surfing on internet. The recorded actions can range from his/her key strokes, internet page history, which site he/she frequently visits, in some cases scanning users' data stored on computer.

As said in the beginning, the purpose ranges from recording users taste for sites, where he shops, on which site he spends more time. All these parameters will help Internet marketers in targeting ads to his/her interest. Worst of all such information can be used or accessed by phisers, who are after peoples financial details, either they sell these information or simple use themselves. This is the most dangerous attempt on your computer you can have.

To spare users from onslaught of advertising agency and phisers, lot of companies have come up with Spyware Antivirus or Spyware Anti-Virus products protecting them from malicious attack. Infect there is whole Spyware Antivirus industry operating for internet users.

Again Spyware Antivirus is computer program and job of Spyware Antivirus is to remove or disable existing Spyware on the computer. Spyware Antivirus also prevents further attack and stops further installation of Spyware on computer. Spyware Antivirus programs watchs and observer for such spyware programs and stop them from installing on host's computer.

You are receiving bounced e-mails in high volume, good chances of trojan spamware running show in your computer.

You have downloaded music online

Your system is extremely slow, it is using your PC's resources, internet bandwidth, modify, delete files, or goes after window registry to change important window programs.

You are being bombarded by those horrible popup ads.

Have you noticed your homepage keeps changing.

Even when your computer offline, your external modem shows lcd light blinking for data transfer.

Malicious attempt to record your keystrokes, sell your financial details to others. They can capture your credit card details or your personal information such as SSN (Social Security Number), birthrate, address etc that can be used to steel identity of person. Well, what does it imply to you - data loss, identity theft, and amount of time put in your work, damage to software on your computer and not to mention it degrades your productivity and loss of investment.

Can create your PC as zombie to let virus, worms and Trojans open computer to act as host for collecting and sending information all over the world.

For more information please visit www.spywareantivirus.info

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