SpywareKilla - What is spyware? | The place for removing spyware

What is spyware?

What is this spyware thing?

Spyware is any program/DLL/file that transfers your private information to another person, company, or server. Usually, it is installed with your consent, believe it or not. Programs like Kazaa have terms and conditions that contain phrases like "When you agree to these terms, you agree to allow third party software to be installed into your computer". However, most of us don't read these terms and conditions. I just skim through it looking for words like "cookies", "spyware", "privacy", and "third party".

How many types of spyware are there?

1. Commercial spyware - This is the main type of spyware that could be in your computer. This type of spyware markets your private information to other other companies that want to send marketing deals to you. It usually collects any possible data that can be mined out of your computer. It can be in the form of programs/registry keys/cookies from marketing companies.

2. Domestic spyware - This type of spyware is usually installed by a spouse, sibling, parent, teacher (if in school), or a nasty person who wants your passwords and other private information. It is not surprising how many people have these things installed, because their spouse... (stated above) wants to find out what they are doing on the internet. For instance, parents wanting to find out who their kids are chatting with online. This is probably the only time where spyware is "useful". However, this "usefulness" can be easily abused by some hacker or evil person. I recommend not to install any form of domestic spyware into anyone's computer because it can destabilize that computer and eat up computer resources.

Why is spyware harmful?

It decreases your connection speed and could hog your internet connection by sending private information about you and your computer to the company/person that made that spyware.
Some spyware may continuously run in the background, slowing down your computer's speed. These are the type that crash and destabilize your computer the most. If you are an avid gamer, I suggest you get rid of this as soon as possible. This is because your game may crash suddenly and may upset you greatly.
Spyware can collect your email address, your private credential info (credit card numbers, pin numbers etc). Some types of spyware can even log your keypresses (what keys you press on the keyboard) and send your passwords to an email account or server. There is a new type of "video-spyware" that can even record what you are doing as a video and send that video to an email address or store it as a password protected file on the hard-drive.
As spyware sends your email address to the company/person who made it, that company/person now can send spam to your email. Also, spyware companies have many "affiliates", who are mainly marketing companies. The spyware makers sell your email address to them. Now has millions of people's emails and confidential info, they now SELL it to other marketing companies that want customers. (about $2,000 for 10,000 email addresses) It's like email shopping. So now you know where most of your spam comes from. A tip: Do not sign up for "free" programs that require your private information, because they will usually send you spam.
If you have spyware in your computer, it shows that your computer is vulnerable to hackers... (get a firewall, update your software - stated in Computing to the Max)

How to tell if your computer is infested with spyware:

When you check your email, do you find your inbox filled with lots of spam (junk mail) that take years to block or use mulitple email addresses to send advertisements?
Do you find that your modem doesn't perform to the optimum speed? Slow downloads?
Does your computer seem to be running (reading from hard drive) when no program is running?
At the taskbar, do you see this sign flashing into this when you are not viewing a web page and/or using an internet-required program?
Do you open emails that have titles like "Great Deals!" and "50% sale!" and go to web sites that are supposed to give you good deals and free coupons for cheap things?

If you answered YES to at least ONE of these questions, there is a 99% chance that you have spyware in your computer.
These things can destabilize and harm your computer in multiple ways as stated above.

OK, I understand. Now give me an example.

A good example are counters and/or stats that track web traffic.

How do you think that they manage to do that?
You may think, "When they detect someone viewing the page, they log that user's IP, browser information, computer information, internet speed and so forth"

Well that's exactly what they do, except in almost all cases they have to "install" a small file to store information of your ip address, browser/computer information etc. They could even get your private information. Gator for example, stores your email address and IP. I'm not sure if they store it in cookies, but many sites use cookies to bombard "specific" ads to you, so you might as well block these cookies to prevent more ads from appearing.
Why don't they just take your information and leave no tracks of it? For one thing, in some cases, they do. However, to make more money, they store this file so affiliates in their marketing network can view that cookies and still again data mine off that file, adding to their massive spam and private information database.

These files that store your information are called cookies. What happens is when you visit a web site, you actually download the cookie while the browser reads the source code. It is sent to your cookies folder. However, cookies can be helpful especially in sites that require you to log in. To allow you to access member information, they store your username and password in that cookies (encrypted), so that you do not need to log in when you view that page again. As you would predict, people would mine that cookie and find your information. The thing is, only affiliates or subdomains/sites that have that cookies access rights can do that. That is why there are huge marketing networks.

Cookie folders:

C:\windows\cookies (windows ME/98/95/3.1)
C:\documents and settings\(username)\cookies (windows XP)

Now, if you really care about your computer and you are fed up with spam, popup's, and want an optimum speed, click on "Spyware Removal "

Note: Not all counters/ads/cookies are spyware. Some spyware cookies just can be found in many sites.