Soaking overnight not recommended

Spam. Phishing. Spyware. These are the things that trouble my poor little computer. Some ideas on prevention can be found here. Excerpt:

If you don't run anti-spyware software, and you use the Internet, chances are at least a few quiet little applications are running in the background on your machine. They might simply be tracking where you browse, serving pop-ups and hijacking links. They might be capturing keystrokes on your system, searching for credit card numbers and other personal information.

Running some kind of spyware software is crucial: A couple of hours with "Spybot Search and Destroy" can clean out a system and bring it back to the world of computing. Think it's not a problem? In "Panic over Spyware", John C. Dvorak reports that Dell is fielding more than 70,000 calls a week related to problems it blames on spyware. That's a lot of nasty little downloads.

Worse yet, as Dvorak points out, spyware is getting nastier, moving on from "market research" to employee and spousal monitoring, spambots, and worse still, identity theft.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has just announced its own anti-spyware tool, now in beta. But regardless of which program you choose, you should be running some kind of spyware remover now. For an excellent introduction to spyware-fighting tools, check out our sidebar on Detecting and Eliminating Adware, and consider running one of the Editors' Choice anti-spyware tools such as Ad-Aware SE Plus 1.02, and Spy Sweeper 2.2 that can scan for spyware in real time while you browse.

Related links here and here.

Posted by: Physics Geek at 02:43 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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