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Spyware is an executable program that secretly collects the information about the internet users and sends this information to somebody we don’t know.
They may misuse our personal information for advertising purpose or sell to some third parties.
It secretly sends the information like which sites we are visiting, credit card numbers, e-mail addresses in our address books, passwords etc.
Spyware can alter the home page in our internet browser, scan our hard disk files, watch keystrokes, read cookies, enter in system registry etc.
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Adware is a software package that automatically displays advertisements when it is installed in our computer.
Sometimes it comes along with the freeware software packages we download from the internet.
Because of spyware/adware, some of the advertisements pop up unexpectedly and our internet browser’s home page may be altered by an unknown site. As they use all our system resources for sending this information, we may experience some lagging or instability in our applications when it is installed in our computer.
We can install anti-spyware programs in our computer which can scan hard disk for spyware and adware.
Examples of anti-spyware/adware programs:
Lavasoft Ad-Aware SE, SpyBot-Search & Destro, PC Tools's Spyware Doctor (commercial) etc.
Setting up anti-virus/ anti-spyware programs for scan:
Anti-virus and anti-spyware programs are to be updated regularly for up to date performance.
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As the updated versions include the description of new viruses they can effectively remove them from our computer.
Many of these programs consist of an auto update feature which provides an option for updates whenever we connect to the internet.
We can set either on-access or on-demand scans for anti-virus programs to run on our computer.
(a) If we set on-access scan, then the anti-virus program always scans continuously for malicious programs when we are using the computer unless we pause it.
(b) If we set on-demand scan, then anti-virus program scans whenever we initiate it to do so or starts scan at the pre-scheduled intervals.
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