Specific Spyware Risks

If you have recently been experiencing difficulties on your computer, then this article has some important news for you. Often, this performance degradation is caused by spyware. I’m going to be discussing the specific effects spyware can have on your system - how it can ruin your computer’s performance, how it can open up the door to further infection, and what vulnerabilities in your computer make this possible. By the time you have finished this article, you will have a good idea of the risks posed by spyware and what to do about them!

When your computer becomes infected by spyware, one of the first signs that you will notice is degraded performance. For many users, this can mean that the computer has become much slower, leading them to believe that it is time to upgrade to a new computer. This is caused by the spyware tying up the system resources - the disk, CPU and network access are often tied up by the resource hungry spyware, leaving little left over for the user’s programs to use. This makes your computer run like treacle uphill!

Another problem is that the Internet connection can become disrupted - you may find yourself being disconnected from the Internet, or have lots of “time out” errors. You may even find that you cannot connect to the Internet at all. This is happening because the spyware is interfering with the network software that all the other programs on your computer rely upon. It can even copy its own code into the network software to protect against Spyware removing.

Also, you need to watch out for the problem of computer instability. What this means is how likely your computer is to crash. This is caused by poor programming by the spyware designers - when the spyware effects other programs as well as itself. Therefore, if it crashes, it will take other programs down too. This can cause you to loose work because you will not be able to save it before the computer crashes.

But if these problems were annoying, the other threats posed by spyware are positively scary.

There are more and more reports coming in of spyware that not only infects your computer - it disables your security software to prevent itself from being discovered and to open the door to further infection! The spyware can disable your firewalls, making it impossible to detect the hidden traffic caused by the spyware reporting back home. It can shut down your anti virus software. It can even advertise your computer’s weakened state to hostile crackers all over the Internet.

All of these effects leave your computer open to infection and can ultimately lead to your computer becoming infected with so much malware that it is impossible to keep it running! This is why software like spyware bot is so popular!

I’m sure you are wondering how spyware manges to find its way onto your computer in the first place. What are the particular weaknesses that allow this to happen? While this article is too short to cover them all - indeed there are entire sitres dedicated to the subject - I can tell you that most of these weaknesses are relate to a single piece of software. In fact, this software has more recorded security weaknesses that any other peice of wideley used software. It is called Windows, and most computer owners use it all the time.

There are several specific weaknesses in Windows that allow this to happen. The first is Internet Explorer, IE is insecure because of the causual way it allows extra software to be installed on your computer, often in the form of ActiveX controls.

For instance, every time you watch an online video, it is running inside an activeX control. This is an example of a non-malicious use of the ActiveX mechanism.

However, spyware and other malware can use the ActiveX mechanism to infect a computer, by embedding itself into a web page. When the user visits the web page, they are prompted to install the activeX control. Most users will simply click on “OK”, ignoring (or simply unaware of) the risks involved. in other cases, javascript on the page forces the spyware to be installed.

Outlook express is far from blame free - in fact, this is a second main path of infection. Most Windows users rely on Outlook Express to read their emails. These emails can become infected with malware. Within Outlook Express, the Internet Explorer is used to display the email messages. This means that many of the weaknesses of IE can be exploited within emails - a risk that most internet users are unaware of.

Finally, there are the risks posed by the setup of Windows itself. By default, the computer user is a fully authorised system administrator. These means that the user can configure any setting on the computer. However, this also means that any program that the user runs can do the same. So, when the spyware is run, it can easily take control of the computer and change all of the most secure settings with ease.

As you can see, in its standards configuration, windows is quite insecure.

So, with all these different threats, I’m sure you will agree that there is a real need to protect yourself against the spyware that is out there. We’ve seen how spyware can harm your computer’s performance, reduce its security settings, and what weaknesses in your system make it possible to get infected with spyware to start with. Luckily, there sis special anti-spyware software that you can install to clean up your computer and prevent infections in the future. It is aware of these weaknesses and is able to patch them up and prevent infection. To find out more, you should read up on a Spyware and adware software review.