PC Safety 101 w/ Master Resell Rights

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Spyware is software that's installed without your informed consent. Spyware communicates personal, confidential information about you to an attacker. The information might be reports on your Web-surfing habits, or the software might be looking for even more sinister information, such as sniffing out your credit card numbers and reporting those numbers. That is about as good a summary as there is. Of course while you read that definition and it sunk in, you probably started thinking "Hey wait a minute, how can that be, people can't just drop little software bombs on my machine!" Actually they can and they do all the time. A colleague's computer was running slowly, in spite of good hardware, a fast processor and a T1 connection. We asked if she had run anti-spyware software and we got a quizzical look. We loaded a couple of scanner programs and found more than 1,300 infections! Most of these are far more irritating than they are dangerous, but they should all be dealt with, and we'll tell you how.

How to Guard Your Computer Against Virtual Threats

AdWare Can Be ­ But Often Isn't ­ "Friendly" Spyware
Adware is the less-malicious cousin of spyware. Often "adware" is designed to simply pay attention to your browsing habits at certain sites or kinds of sites and tell a server someplace what kinds of ads and other information to include on the pages shown to you. In this sense ­ the most generous view ­ it is a form of personalized marketing, and because these things started as ad-serving assistants they are called "adware" even now, when many of them track your behavior, which is one problem, and slow your web connection to a crawl, which for many of us is the real main problem. If you order from a clothing company a few times a year, you may well not mind if there is a cookie from that company that makes sure you see the sale items you're likely to be most interested in ­ but if that cookie is slowing down your ability to work, you may well want to get rid of it anyway.

Helping to distinguish between truly friendly cookies and other "spyware" and the bad stuff is something we'll cover shortly. First let's take a look at viruses, then the more vexing and current problem of spyware and its many guises.

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 communicat
ions stop for a while. We're more concerned with what they do and how to stop them than why people bother to invent and disseminate them in the first place.

How to Guard Your Computer Against Virtual Threats

What Viruses Do
What viruses do varies but it 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 traffic 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 misbehave 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 cannot 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 pretty 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 checks 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 McAfee.

How to Guard Your Computer Against Virtual Threats

Best Antivirus Bets: Norton and McAfee
Norton is now owned by Symantec, a company that itself helped pioneer virus and other computer security software. Norton was a 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 all incoming items like email, Internet file downloads, and removable disks, drives and CDs for viruses.