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What is Spyware & Adware
Whilst the Internet is a powerful resource and provides users with many
useful and often entertaining things to see and do, it also has its dark side.
Most people are familiar with freeware, shareware, cookies, media players,
interactive content, and file sharing.
What they may not realize is that some of the aforementioned may contain code
or components that allow the developers of these applications and tools to
actually collect and disseminate information about those using them.
They can track your surfing habits, abuse your Internet connection by sending
this data to a third party, profile your shopping preferences, hijack your
browser start page or pages, alter important system files, and can do this
without your knowledge or permission. The security and privacy implications of
these exploits should be quite obvious and undesirable on any system or network!
Below is links to the key software that I use personal and professional basis
for combating this continual threat
Key Software
- Ad-Aware
Ad-Aware is designed to provide advanced protection from known Data-mining,
aggressive advertising, Parasites, Scumware, selected traditional Trojans,
Dialers, Malware, Browser hijackers, and tracking components. With the
release of Ad-Aware SE Personal edition, Lavasoft takes the fight against
Spyware to the next level.
Ad-Aware can be downloaded by clicking
here
- Spybot Seach & Destroy
SpyBot-S&D searches your hard drive for so-called spy- or
adbots; little modules that are responsible for the ads many programs
display. But many of these modules also transmit information about your
surfing behaviour and more to the net.
If SpyBot-S&D finds such modules, it can remove them - or replace them
with empty dummies in case their host software won't run with its bot
removed. In most cases, the host still runs fine after removing the bot. For
a list of 'supported' bots see the feature lists below. The Spybot-S&D
interface is so easy, that updates just require replacing a file of about
80k in size. Those updates are distributed by my software mailinglist, at
the authors page and are also available from inside the programs update
section.
Another feature of Spybot S&D is the removal of usage tracks, which makes
it more complicated for unknown spybots to transmit useful data. The list of
last visited websites, opened files, started programs, cookies, all that and
more can be cleaned. Supported are the three major browsers Internet
Explorer, Netscape Communicator and Opera.
Last but not least Spybot-S&D contains some routines to find and correct
invalid entries into the registry
Spybot Search and Destroy can be downloaded by clicking
here
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