Article: SPYWARE: What it is and how to deal with it.

SPYWARE: What it is and how to deal with it.

Computerworks
Scarborough, ME

There are four major external threats facing the average home and small business PC user today: viruses, hackers, spam and spyware. The first three are commonly understood and the majority of hand-wringing, money and effort gets put into thwarting hackers, catching viruses and trying to get mandatory minimum sentences for spammers. But the fourth threat, spyware, is only recently starting to garner the level of attention it deserves. In our opinion, spyware is second only to viruses on the list of real threats to PC users.

You have it right now. Everyone does. You most likely have alot of it, but you don't know it. The only people reading now who don't have at least some of this software on their PCs have either already been made aware of the threat and have taken steps to combat it, or aren't on the internet, and even some of them have it. If you have kids on the internet, you have tons of it.

Spyware is a catch-all term for adware and spyware in all its forms, which can include trojan horses, data miners, pop-up vehicles, etc. Spyware typically is distinguished from viruses by its commercial nature, but can be just as damaging. Most spyware is trying to sell you something or gather information about you and/or your habits to sell to others quietly so you don't catch on. You should be concerned, as concerned as you are about viruses, for a few reasons, a couple technical and one moral. Spyware steals computing power away from the tasks you would like to do with your machine that you paid good money for; it destabilizes your machine and it's just plain rude.

Your computer is just a big calculator. It runs at a fixed speed as it crunches its way through math problems. The faster your computer, the more complex problems it can do in a given amount of time. Everything you do on your computer is just a math problem, as far as the machine is concerned: every window you open, every email you get, every program you launch. A given machine that started out with Windows 98 and was then upgraded to Windows XP will run more slowly under the new operating system, given the same hardware, due to the fact that Windows XP is a more complicated math problem for the machine to solve than Windows 98 was. It'll do it, it just takes a little longer to do anything. Every program that runs on your machine grabs a slice of the total resources your machine has available to do this work. The more programs running, the more the resources (RAM, processor power, etc.) get spread thin between them. If your machines available resources are being eaten up by software you did not choose to install or ask for that is doing things with those resources that you do not want or need, you are not getting your money's worth out of the computer you bought.

Spyware eats resources voraciously. I have seen machines come into the shop literally crippled with the stuff. There are so many small uninvited applications running in the background collecting data, spying and spewing forth pop-up ads that the machine is slowed to a halt, unable to respond to requests for action, such as opening a web browser or running your accounting program. Not every infected machine is crippled to this degree, but all are to some extent.

Your computer's operating system provides an environment for you to use your machines hardware resources to do work. That environment is extremely complicated. The more programs you have running, the more complicated it gets. The more complicated it gets, the more unstable it becomes. A brand new well-designed machine, running a fresh installation of Windows will typically run well-written applications without problems for years. For example, if you buy a new workstation for your candy store, install your point-of-sale software on it and nothing else, you can expect that machine to run crash-free for a long, long time. It's only when you start complicating the environment by installing and un-installing programs, customizing, adding screen savers and toolbars, asking it do a wider and wider range of tasks all side-by-side with other increasingly more complicated tasks that instability creeps in. Poorly written software compounds the problem, and most spyware is poorly written. So now you have a large collection, often dozens of examples in just a modestly infected PC, of poorly written software programs running on your machine that you didn't ask for. This contributes greatly to instability, instability leads to frustration and eventually you are driven to spend money in the shop here having us fix the machine after you decide you can't take it any more.

You are not alone in despising spyware, and lucky for us some of the people who despise spyware know how to write software that we can use to fight it. One popular utility we can recommend is Ad-aware from Lavasoft. It is the most polished and professional weapon we have available, and does a fine job cleaning up moderate infestations. The basic utility is free from their website at: http://www.lavasoft.de/ Run it like you would a virus scanner, making sure to update the program before you start the scan. The software can only find spyware it knows about and updating is how you make sure it can cast the widest net. Run it every week or so to remove new infections. We have a .pdf document available here with basic instructions on how to run the program.

Just a note: don't be surprised if your kid's peer-to-peer file sharing software stops working after you finish the removal. Several of the more popular P2P applications bundle themselves with large quantities of spyware, and due to their agreements with the spyware manufacturers, the main program checks to make sure it's spyware buddies are actively spying every time it loads. If they aren't, they either get repaired or the program will refuse to start.

Get rid of your spyware problems and get your moneys worth out of your PC again.