Why Spyware is so Dangerous

by Terence Young

Spyware is software that gets installed on your computer without your knowledge and sometimes is designed to record what you type on the keyboard and send to others. What makes spyware so dangerous is that it likes to collect personal information to include credit card numbers and passwords and send them elsewhere. The most dangerous spyware is of the type that records your keystrokes and sends the information to the interested parties. Think about it. If you use the Internet to pay bills, do banking, purchase items, or look up personal information then you will inevitably use keystrokes to direct the processes. You will use keystrokes to enter credit cards, passwords, birth dates, social security numbers and many more important data items that uniquely identify you as the owner of that information.

Now no one would put software on their computer if they knew it would steal their personal information and the makers of spyware know this and came up with a solution. Another characteristic that makes spyware so dangerous is the fact that it usually installs without the knowledge of the user. How does it do this? It usually gets installed as part of an installation of desirable software you are aware of installing. In other words, the spyware piggybacks off of a software product you willingly put on your system. Viruses can install spyware also.

There are many other characteristics of spyware that add to its danger. Some spyware opens remote access to a stranger to your computer. A stranger can actually control your computer from some other location and you would never know who. There is an especially dangerous sort of spyware known as a bot. Bots, once installed on your system, can be controlled via the Internet Relay Chat protocol or channel and can do things like start emailing viruses and spam to other users when it collects all email addresses found on your computer. Then the email recipient multiplies the problem when the same bot installs on the target computer and starts emailing spam and viruses as well. If you have virus protection that checks outgoing emails. This can get especially irritating if you have a bot on your system as the virus scanner will catch every outgoing mail with this virus and drag your system down in terms of performance. It is a good thing however if your antivirus software does catch it instead of allowing it to be spread.

Another characteristic of spyware that makes it so dangerous is the fact that it can significantly degrade the performance of your computer. All of that activity engaged in by the spyware program utilizes the resources of your computer. Just having a piece of software that is engaged in creating popup ads heavily consumes computer resources. Plus, these spyware programs are not models of high-performance software. These programs are typically written by hackers who have little or no knowledge of sound software design principles and can create software that performs very poorly by consuming too many system resources.

And to sum it up, spyware is an absolute nuisance. It just makes a computing experience dreadful. Get yourself some good tools to protect against it.

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