Cognitive - Content

Friday, November 04, 2005

Spywares

I had a painful experience of cleaning up a system of one of my friend. His Laptop was infested with Worms and Virusses, removing all of that was itself a pain, needing more than half days work, not mentioning the adwares and spywares that were present. I would be a little modest here if i said that i found just hundreds of virusses/ adwares.

While a Lot of people use PC's, not many are quite aware of what threats they might be facing and how to protect themselves. If you are an typical internet user without much knowledge of what might get into your PC, then read this Presentation,on spy and adwares.
spyware_adware.ppt


There are quite a possibility that you do not understand a lot of terms in it, if so, then read this glossary of Key terms.

The best way to deal with spywares is to prevent them from downloading on to your system, here is a good website with tips for prevention

for those who dont have the time to read them all,

1) Use a good anti-spy ware, which will make sure that your system remains safe when you surf on the net. (Do take care of keeping your anti-spyware software definition up to date for better protection!)

2) Visit only trusted sites. This will reduce the risk of your encountering any such spyware, which comes from unauthorized sites.

3) Use a proper email protection tool. This will help in reducing the spread of such programs.

4) Keep a constant watch on the speed of your PC and also the speed of internet that you are using, if you feel there is any decline in the speed of pc or net, scan your system for spyware.

5) Remove all unwanted applications from the ‘Start Up’ and ‘Add/Remove Application’ Menus.

(Tip: if you are not a internet aware user, then i would recommend you to use firefox for al browsing, except for certain business sites which do not fully support Firefox yet. you can download a free copy of Firefox by clicking here or the Firefox logo to the right)

Finally if you are already a victim, you can look here for some good tools,

Download.com


Zdnet

Cnet

(I use Ad aware on my system, and would recommend it. However most of the popular tools are quite good)

2 comments:

NaiKutti said...

Ad aware is a sweet tool that i have used... but sometimes have found that it doesn't detect some spy wares... so i used Spy Bot too along with ad aware... but now with my PC making fewer connections to the net, am happy with the microsoft's antispyware tool...

Suguna said...

hmm that was an eye opener to a not so technical person like me. u have wriien it so clean and simple that i really liked this article a lot. shall sure pass this info to all i know. keep up the good work sur.