Viruses, Spyware and AdwareNo one wants a computer virus, they are annoying and harmful. They can erase your hard drive; erase important programs and data from your computer. It can cause pop ups that drive you crazy and they can cause your computer to just crawl. Computer thieves can steal your personal information as well as your identity. Malicious malware is just plain aggravating to say the least.
If you do not take extreme measures you will surely become a victim. You will be a victim of spy ware, adware, and viruses. These things hide very well and sometimes until you notice that programs are not loading properly or fast enough, or maybe you have a cable connection that runs more like a dial up, then you will realize that something is wrong. In some instances, you may actually have to completely clean your hard disk and reinstall everything.
Once a virus inserts itself into the other programs, documents, or email attachments, you can pretty much click on anything and you will have executed a virus. Once your computer is infected, it can do a lot of damage. It can slow down the computer, overloading the memory, destroying important data or programs. It will also go even farther by infecting everyone in your address book.
Spyware and adware are also common nuisances that can track all of your activities while you are online, trace your keyboard strokes; gather all of your email information, password information, and credit card information and spread it all over. Adware and spyware can cause some freakish things to happen on your computer, you might even think it is haunted. You go online one day and your entire browser is changed, your desktop is changed, and you are running programs that you never installed. Odds are that you have been hit by adware or what many call, hijacked.
Spyware, like the term, spies on you while you are online. Again, they record keystrokes and screenshots and send them to attackers in the hopes of gathering information, password information, and credit card information to use for their own benefit. It kind of makes you wonder how all of this maliciousness came about. Well, in the beginning, internet and software were free until people realized that they could make money from it by incorporating advertisements with the free services. While that was going well for a while, the advertising market got much tighter and in order to make the free services and software profitable, spyware and adware rose to the front of the line. There was obviously going to have to be a trade off somewhere.
Do not let the cost of the tradeoff rest on your shoulders and just be wise. Stay away from pirated software, click no on all pop up boxes, unless of course you are physically attempting to download something, before you download anything use spychecker, which is a program that checks to see if what you are about o download contains spyware, install a firewall, and scan your computer regularly for viruses, adware, and spyware.
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