As you surf the World Wide Web, many times you encounter
offers that seem to be harmless.
Programs, Screensavers, backgrounds
and a
multitude of other computer related items are available to download from the
Internet for “Free”.
Are they really free? May be free of cost but if people took
the time to read the Licensing Agreement (EULA), they would find that the offer
is not free of Strings. Of course not
all the authors of the Spy ware include the information in EULA that even warms
the user of the additional
programs that come with the “free” download.
These strings can include tracking programs to determine the
sires you visit on the web, Trojans and worms that can be used to call “home”
and run continually on your PC, programs that provide unscrupulous marketers
with all the email address in your address book so they can be spammed,
annoying pop-up ads, dialers, browse hijackers that will redirect your browser
to a new home page or search Engine, and many other nefarious malware programs
that bog down or crash your computer.
Another side effect of spy ware is that much of the code is
poorly written and is the most prevalent reason for computing
problems on PC’s
today. System Lockups unexpected reboot, the blue screen of death, the
inability to shutdown, extremely slow processing speeds, the inability to
connect to the internet are a host of other problems can be directly traced to
spy ware.
As of 2005, spy ware has become one of the pre-eminent
security threats to computer-systems running Microsoft Windows operating-systems
(and especially to users of Internet Explorer because of that browser's
collaboration with the Windows operating system). Some malware on the Linux and
Mac OS X platforms has behavior similar to Windows spy ware, but to date has
not become anywhere near as widespread due to their comparatively smaller user
base