Spyware has gone through many evolutions recently. In the beginning it was a piece of software
that was designed to run on your system and provide advertising. It did this by monitoring your
web access and, supposedly, based on where you go, would pop up advertising. This type of software,
although undesirable, was generally fairly easy to remove and was usually acquired by downloading
software such as free movie playing or MP3 sharing software. It could be removed by uninstalling
the free software and then the spyware software from add/remove programs.
The next generation of spyware was a little more malicious. Generally it would appear in the form of
toolbars and claim to be a “Search assistant” or “Internet Optimizers”. These applications would
actually make changes such as redirecting your home page and default search engine to their services.
When you would search, they would guide you to their sites and again provide advertising. Some of the
advertising, amusingly enough, are pop-ups indicating that you might be infected with spyware.
Unfortunately these applications are a little more difficult to remove and even if you manage to uninstall
everything from add/remove programs you are generally left with the program still installed and still
causing problems.
The most recent generation of spyware is again more malicious. You can actually be infected by this spyware
just by visiting a suspect site. It can take advantage of vulnerabilities inside Internet Explorer, automatically
downloading and installing itself. It can then hijack your default home page, redirect all of your searches
and pop up copious amounts of advertising, much of which is highly inappropriate! This version of spyware can
also be very difficult to remove as it can install several different versions of itself that automatically
start when your computer does. These different versions would at all times make sure the others exist and
if you removed one, you would actually immediately find it put back in place by one of the others. We have
actually seen versions of this spyware make changes that include different backgrounds with more advertising
as well as the filling of favorites with many unwanted sites.
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