Protecting Yourself Against Spyware And Adware

Some people use the terms spyware and adware interchangeably as if they are the same thing. Sure  they are both designed to invade our privacy but their purposes diverge in several ways.

Spyware is worse than adware because its main purpose is to track your behaviour and maybe even collect your your banking habits, passwords and credit card numbers.  This could eventually lead to “identity theft.”  The smallest issue is the performance issues on your computer, as the spyware takes up some of your system resources to work.  Spyware is usually invisible to the user.

Adware is not invisible like spyware.  One major behaviour of adware is to produce pop-ups that are designed to market either something similar to what your browsing habits suggest, or whatever the sponsor has to sell.  Mostly we get adware by downloading some free thing from the web.  Games are prime adware carriers, because everybody loves a free game.  Often the EULA of the free game states clearly that you are agreeing to ads.  It is certainly lucky for the adware suppliers that hardly anybody reads EULAs, isn’t it?  Software firewalls like Comodo and ZoneAlarm are great for protecting you from the actions of Adware and Spyware, but only if you understand how these firewalls work.  The firewall will usually throw up a dialog saying “xyz.exe is trying to access the Internet.” If you habitually allow these actions, you are defeating your firewall.  You might look at the notice and ask yourself if you just hit a button asking for an action that required some program asking to access the internet.  If so, it is probably safe to allow the access, but it you are not doing anything that requires the internet, just reading a web page, or playing solitaire, and a request comes up, then I suggest you respond with “Deny.”  If something useful quits working, then you know what the issue was, but if nothing apparently is damaged by denying the access, then you are alerted to the possibility of adware or spyware and you can start looking for the proof.

One really important thing is to avoid accepting unsolicited security software from unknown sources.  One of the most successful methods for infecting computers with the bagel virus was sending out a fake virus alert with a link to the virus-killer or an attached virus-killer file.  This was, in fact, the virus itself, and you voluntarily installed it on your computer.  Eeeek! One usefull program for checking for spyware is spybot S & D, which is a free application and very good.  You need to update weekly at least and run immunization (to keep from getting ‘drive-by-installs’ of malware from infected hacked sites) and run the spyware detector weekly to see how you’re doing on self-defense.

The best protection from adware or spyware is to run a flavour of Linux, so most of the programs cannot get traction.  Linux machines do not run Windows programs, and most adware and spyware is designed for Windows.  You can download Desktop Ubuntu as a “live disk” and try it out without even installing the operating system on your computer.