Adware and spyware advice

Spyware is a program that secretly gathers information about what you do on your PC and quite often it does this without your knowledge.

• in its least dangerous form it is known as Adware and it collects information about your Internet habits on behalf of companies
• the more annoying adware can pop up adverts as you surf

How does it work?

• in its more dangerous form it can act like a 'Trojan', a particularly dangerous program that captures your passwords, credit card numbers and other sensitive information as you type them
• it will send this information to criminal gangs who will try to use it to defraud you
• you do not have to be connected to the Internet to be spied upon, but once on the Internet any information gathered can be sent to the person(s)/organisation spying on you
• spyware removers search out these programs in the same way as anti-virus and can also block those annoying pop-up adverts

There are many free anti-spyware programs out there which can be downloaded and used to scan your PC for spyware and adware, a couple of good ones are XoftSpy and Ad-aware. Links to these and to other anti-spyware scanners can be found in our useful links section.

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