Articles   Home of Articles | Submit your creativity to Articles What is spyware? What is spyware? I browsed Google search engine to look for the meaning of SPYWARE. At the bottom of Google result page I found Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The Wikipedia stated a spyware differs from neither viruses nor worms. It is designed for a commercial gain such as to study user behavior on web browsing for marketing purpose, to delivera pop-up advertisement and etc. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyware). For me, it is a spy software. In short we call it spyware.. The spyware runs as a secret service in your pc and keeps on tracking your browsing behavior. Then, it will match your behavior pattern to the statistic which resides on its server somewhere in the Internet. After it matched the behavior pattern against the statistic, the spyware will deliver a pop up advertising banner. The pop up advertising banner has a timer, for example, every 5 minutes it will change the banner. This is pretty annoying to your eyes. Imagine the spyware collecting data from the Internet users all around the world. It’s like a research tool to study people and snooping on our Internet activities. The spyware can track which web site we visited, what kind of web site content and etc. It will report to the server which acts as its master and store our activities. The owner of spyware is making a profit by using our personal computer without our permission. How to block this spyware on your pc? We need to clean it and kill spywares. The best tool to do this job is “Spybot:Seek & Destroy”(http://www.spybot.info/) . It is free. You can update the software to get the latest spywares outbreak.Yahoo toolbar (http://toolbar.yahoo.com/) also offers a free spyware cleaner. How does this spyware affect the pc performance? Once the program is running on your pc it will take your pc’s CPU and memory resources. You can see the memory usage by pressing ctrl+alt+del on Windows XP. At the processes tab it will show the Image Name, User Name , Cpu Usage and Memory Usage. The more your pc Memory is consumed by the spyware the slower your pc performance will become. Content Statistic Author izhan(click view profail) Point 2 Times Of View 991 Date 2006-01-10 Please Vote 1-Suck 2 3 4 5-sortOFOK 6 7 8 9 10-Great