Web & Internet

There is this one law school student whose thesis is about money laundering so oftentimes she would Google the term to come up with a ready list of online references. This easy tool was extremely useful to the student in her writing process. Within months, the law school student began to experience a fluke as her trusty search engines began directing her towards completely unrelated websites that had nothing to do with money laundering.

Originally she considered that the problem could be with the search engine or in her internet, but the frequency and repeated nature of the problem made her think that someone had bugged her computer. No one likes to be bugged, but at least when the offenders are human, we can fend them off. In contrast, the law school student was faced with adware and spyware bugs, whose attacks are difficult to fend off. The fact that the law student only uses her computer to write and research her papers is good proof that she is not well educated enough in technology to have ease in battling these computer bugs.

The student’s case is similar to that of many people who find themselves caught up in the advance technological problems of spyware and adware alert. The word ’spyware’ was coined in 1995, though it was not until the year 2000 that it began seeing frequent use by the general populace. Personal information becomes readily available to another party once the computer user unwittingly downloads a computer script or software program onto their computer.

Though this is frequently done by looking at the user’s keystrokes and web surfing history, it can also be accomplished by looking at the materials stored on a user’s hard drive. Though it sounds like something out of a James Bond movie, anyone can be a victim of spyware. Invading other’s privacy is a highly intrusive act that definitely makes the innocents involved victims. Admittedly spyware has beneficial uses such as allowing the tracking of criminals, but those potential uses are frequently ignored as crooks use the program for their own criminal activities, such as stealing credit card information. No one should be with a lax anti-spyware program, considering the amount of damage these programs could cause.

As they are similarly harmful programs, malware and adware should be blocked along with spyware. Helping in these tasks are the many blocker programs designed for adware and spyware. Because they cause a lack of privacy and can disrupt normal computer use, spyware, adware, and malware can be just as much of an annoyance as viruses and worms, even though they are do not self-replicate as those programs do. Both the individual programs and the computer itself can experience a drastic decline in speed after the computer has been infected with these programs. Sadly, many times spyware is such a good ’spy’ that it can evade detection as the root of the crime. Because of the nasty nature of the infiltration programs, it is always best to have a great blocker to prevent the infections from happening.