Are You a Victim of Spyware?

Mary C. | 16 July 2004 |

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Are you a victim of Spyware?

Many computer users are infected with spyware (a.k.a. scumware and adware) and don’t even know it. Are you infected? Does you computer exhibit any of the following traits:

Pop up windows happen regularly - perhaps even on a 90 second timer.

Your search results pages are "hijacked" - taking you to another site or popping up a website in response to your keyword search

Your homepage is reset (to porn or gambling) and you can’t change it back.

These is not normal behavior for your computer to display. It can generally be fixed by downloading a popular anti-spyware program and "cleansing" your computer. Try any of the ones below. If that doesn’t solve the problem, try another one (occasionally it takes more than one program to cleanse all the spyware): Spybot Search and Destroy, Ad Aware, CWShredder and HijackThis.

How do you avoid being infected with spyware in the future? Be careful downloading free tools, browser enhancements, games or screensavers. Many of these "free" tools are designed explicitly to act as a Trojan horse — to deliver a malicious program to an unsuspecting user. Also, keep the security patches for your PC and your browser up to date. Up-to-date security patches will help keep the most malicious programs away. Finally, the best solution might be to switch to an alternative browser like Opera or Mozilla — both of which are quite nice, and arguably as good or better than Internet Explorer.