Feb 2005

Well perhaps not exactly, but there is a lot of what is called “spyware” out on the Internet. One obvious sign is if you suddenly find your browser homepage has moved to some other site. Those free toolbars, fun cursors and other things which seem to be given away, in most cases have a sting in the tail. The benign ones simply report all your surfing to a third party and slow your browsing down, which is bad enough, while the worst can log your key strokes and record your passwords and credit number numbers. Also the nasty ones can hide and be very difficult to remove. Spyware also tends to lead to machine crashes and other undesirable things.

So in addition to your virus checker, you need an adware/spyware blocker and one which will remove spyware if it gets on your machine. One very popular one is Ad-aware from LavaSoft, another Spy-Subtract from InterMute and now Microsoft has a free beta test one at http://www.microsoft.com/spyware/ which does the job. Again this software needs to be kept up to date at least once a week, because new spyware keeps appearing. Links for the sites will be on The Boffin website, and a Google search will give you more information than you probably want to see.

Just remember, backup your system, keep your virus and spyware checkers up to date, and think before you download this little application, or open that e-mail which you know nothing about. I know of at least four different people getting their PCs rebuilt at the moment. And it is wasting much time and is very frustrating for them. A little care will save you from joining them.