Understanding Spyware

You may be familiar with spyware, as it has been in the news a lot in the last year or two, and finally the major software companies are responding with updates to their security software designed to defeat this annoying and potentially very damaging stuff.

While spyware is, to most people, a recent phenomenon in 2005, in fact what could be called spyware effectively started back in 1996, on what at that time was the most popular ISP, America Online. There was a piece of malicious software designed to grab confidential information of subscribers, the so-called AOL Password Trojans.

Spyware is much more problematic than viruses for several important reasons:

1. The purpose of spyware is to gather information about you – the information may be fairly harmless or confidential, valuable and important.

2. Spayware often works silently

3. Spyware is almost never an executable file

4. Spyware is almost entirely undetectable by traditional antivirus software methods, as well as invisible to most firewall – so it needs to be dealt with on its own, and its presence (at least briefly) in your computer may not entirely avoidable.
5. Spyware is everywhere including friendly sites, friendly software and other places, so while there are no good viruses there are some “good” or at least inert pieces of spyware.
   

Spyware hides all over your computer system, and believe it or not, you may actually have agreed indirectly to let it!

You did it by enabling cookies on your web browser. But disabling cookies may make certain sites not function at all and certain functions within sites unavailable such as most any login, so disabling cookies is usually not the best way to avoid spyware problems. Besides, cookies are often friendly and the spyware ones are easy to separate out with scanning software.

You also did it by downloading items like pictures, video clips and music from websites. But never downloading again isn’t too practical, right?

Most common places for spyware and its various subtypes to “hide” on your machine are:

• Temporary files, especially Temporary Internet Files/Browser Cache

• Cookies (these may be friendly items also)

• Favorite listings

• Registries (these are usually the most seriously bad items)

• In some cases as image files or within image files

A typical small business PC may have upwards of 100,000 files on it, so there are plenty of
places for tiny non-executable files to hide.

Spyware comes from many, many places, but the most common kinds of sites are those that are for shopping or offer downloadable information including:

• Shopping sites and portal

• Bulletin boards and information exchanges sites

• Gaming sites

• Download sites

• “Lifestyle” sites such as those aimed at teenagers or brides to be

• Sites that rely on serving customer content

• Adult entertainment sites and portals

It may not be practical to avoid all of these, but a large percentage of spyware does come from these kinds of places.

Best Antivirus Bets: Norton and Mc Afee

Norton is now owned by Symantec, a company that itself helped pioneer virus and other computer security software.

Norton was former competitor of Symantec's. The Norton Antivirus, which is typically offered in a major version revision each year – Antivirus 2003, Antivirus 2004, Antivirus 2005 and so on – is one of the best investments you can make for the health and safety of your PC. At around $35 per machine or less, this program will scan your whole system, as well as incoming items like email, internet file downloads, and removable disks, drives and CDs for viruses.

You can set the “Live Update” feature to automatically update the so-called “virus definitions”, and you should. We will talk more about virus definitions below.

Mc Afee is the other 800 pound gorilla in the antivirus software area.
Whereas Norton started with a Macintosh focus and has generally been marketed to the consumer and prosumer as well as small business markets, Mc Afee has had greater cache and success specifically in the business arena, where they have often been the #1 choice. Mc Afee still offers numerous “managed” virus prevention packages for larger companies as well as standalone software geared to the home office and consumer markets. Mc Afee is currently owned by Network Associates, the old official internet registrar and current internet service firm.

What Viruses Do

What viruses do varies but is is always bad, if sometimes amusing. Some will try to destroy your computer (on the software level, although some will actually “physically”harm your hard drive disks. Some will simply replicate themselves, for example, sending copies of themselves to everyone in your Microsoft Outlook contact lists, then to everyone in theirs, and so on (these are called worms). Some will be programmed to create huge amounts of traffics onto certain websites – such as a major corporate site, a major commerce site, or a major news outlet site – to cause the site to become unusually slow or to stop working altogether.

Some viruses are supposed to be humorous. They may make little sheep dance across your screen, or make your keyboard make belching sounds when you type.

Some viruses, often called “worms”will actually make your system miss behave in specific ways – such as redirecting your attempts to visit a certain site to another site. One famous worm recently redirected Google searches in a scheme that sent surfers to a German based site that exactly replicated Google, except served all ads from the people sponsoring the worm!

Some viruses are not funny at all, and can destroy data that can not be recovered. While spyware and other bad software will often need to be removed rather than prevented, viruses should be prevented, and the good news is, that's easy to do.

The most important, and luckily easiest, step any computer owner or administrator can do is to install, enable, update and continually run a quality security program that check for viruses.
There are dozens of software brands out there but there are two that even now are head and shoulders above the rest, Norton, and Mc Afee.

Understanding Viruses

You’re probably familiar with viruses, as they have been around the longest and most people are familiar with “virus software”, more accurately termed virus detection and removal software.

A computer virus is normally an executable program that arrives on your computer hidden within something else, like an email, or an email attachment. The typical computer virus is designed, very simply, to cause you, your computer, and other computers, problems.

You may wonder why anyone would bother to develop software specifically to cause problems, and the motives are as complex as the motives for any bad behavior. Some viruses have been developed by programmers to see what could accomplish, in a mischievous way.

Some have been developed to hurt certain companies or industries by, for example, aggrieved ex employees or nefarious competitors. Some have been developed for political or other purposes – including, debatably, actual terrorism, since “denial of service” and other virus-based online attacks can make communications stop for a while.

Why You Need to Worry About Malware

As a successful enterpreneur you need to communicate all day, every day, with your customers, suppliers, partners, employees, and others. You need to keep records. You need to have reliable access to email and the internet.

Nasty little software programs are out there which will slow, snarl or even stop your computer and your internet connection.

Some of them will track your activity, and some will even mine your personal or business information. This malicious software – or “malware” for short – is an every day problem that can, if left unchecked, render your computer worthless, harm your business, and potentially even harm your life.

Have you noticed mysterious slowdowns in your computer's performance, even when you only have one or two programs (apparently) running?

Have you noticed a lag in your web surfing, even though you have a very fast broadband connection?

Almost certainly if you have, it's because spyware or adware is taxing your system, slowing things down for you while sending information you may not want sent, to places you almost certainly don't want it sent to.

The bad news is that this stuff is everywhere now, including coming from sites of reputable companies that you have chosen to do business with. There are probably dozens, maybe even hundreds, of pieces of bad tracking software and viruses lurking on your computer right now.

The better news is that as in real life medicine, an ounce of prevention beats a pound of cure...
And the best news is that you can malware-proof your computer for very little money and without any special computer knowledge!