You are working for a famous company with a good salary. Recently you have purchased a gift item through
online shopping. After few days you have received your
credit card bill and you are shocked by looking at the bill.
Then you have strictly decided not to go for online shopping. After few days your friend is in need of money and he asked you for some good amount of money. Since both of you have online account and you thought that
online money transfer is the easiest thing. After the money being transferred from your account number you found that there was a significance difference in your money balance.
This time you have stringently decided that no online shopping, no online account and only use the internet for other purposes. Then you have tried to open a website and you found that the homepage has changed. When you are trying to open a website you noticed that the browser automatically redirecting to another website which displayed many advertisements which are in your area of interest.
All the words those I have italicized are not just italicized words. But they are the areas where everyone has to take care when we are using the internet.
Who knows your credit card number except you? Who transferred your money from your account to another account without your knowledge? Who changed your home page and who made the web browser to redirect to another website???
It is the stupid Spyware doing all these non – sense.
According to Trend Micro Inc … Spyware is a program that monitors and gathers user’s information for other purposes.
According to McAfee Inc … Spyware is a software that transmits personal information to third parties without the user’s knowledge or consent.
Definition doesn’t matter here but the effect matters. Unlike virus Spyware does not self-replicate and it is always in contact with the outside world through the internet. It has become one of the preeminent security threats to computer running Windows operating system. Computers where Internet Explorer is the major browser are particularly vulnerable to such attacks not only because of IE but because it’s tight integration with Windows allows Spyware access to crucial parts of the operating systems. So avoid using Internet Explorer and Outlook.
Spyware is more dangerous than virus. Because it stays behind us and it will observe all the websites we are browsing and finally it will finds our area of interest. Next time when you are trying to browse any website it will automatically redirects to other websites which is monitored by Spyware attackers and in between it will ask your personal information by showing attractable advertisements.
Not only through advertisements but Spyware directly can collect our personal information like credit card number, user names, passwords etc . . . by piggybacking on a desirable software.
So, one should be very careful while using the internet. Let us see the possible doors through which the Spyware automatically get install in our system.
The big door is Internet Explorer. IE accepts every request as it feels very shy to monitor the coming requests. When we are browsing any website in IE, sometimes it will pop-ups a window with a message Would like to optimize your internet access? with two buttons yes or no. It doesn’t matter which button we press a download will start and it will installs Spyware in your system. IE 7 or later version can stop this type of attacks only up to some extent. But it’s better not to use IE and its components like outlook and prefer Mozilla and Thunderbird.
Spyware can also comes through by installing shareware software. When we download software from sharewares and when we install it, the installer automatically installs Spyware in our system. The main program does no harm but the Spyware will do all the stupid things.
It is very difficult to find out which sharewares are safe. And it is very difficult to stop Spyware from its functionality. The windows operating system registry contains multiple sections and by modifying keys values allows the software to be executed automatically when system boots. First time when the Spyware installs in our system it will creates many links in the registry. If we have removed many of those links to stop the Spyware from being executed, they are automatically restored when the system reboots.
If one cannot avoid using IE or if one cannot predict which shareware is safe w
e need a watchman which protects our system from being attack. Spybot Search & Destroy is one of the best such watchmen. But it is not the only one but make sure that other anti Spywares are not “rogue”.
Download and install Spybot Search & Destroy. Change the mode to Advanced Mode and click on Update to update the product. After updating the product click on Search & Destroy button which is shown on left side of the Spybot main window. Then click on Check for problems to scan the whole system. After the scanning is completed, if it has detected any Spyware, it will display red entries. Click on Fix problems to fix the detected Spyware.
After fixing the Spyware we have to immunize the file system. To do so, first close all browsers and click on Immunize button. We can observe the immunization process through a bar. Below that it will show all the browsers that the system has. After the immunization is over make sure that all the components in the browser are protected. If any components are unprotected, click again on Immunize button. Immunization protects web browsers from being attacked by spyware as well as it will protects the whole file system.
There are two more important features we can observe in Spybot S&D. They are Resident S&D helper and Resident TeaTimer. Since we are already in advanced mode click on Tools and then on Resident. Then find “Resident protection Status” and make sure that those two check boxes are checked to activate Resident S&D helper. Spybot S&D acts like a first layer protection for IE and it blocks the Spyware comes from IE. Resident S&D helper acts like a second layer protection for IE and it blocks the badware and malware which comes through other methods.
Resident TeaTimer specially focuses on registry changes. When we are installing/uninstalling any software it will ask for allow/deny registry change. If you know the name of that software you are installing then you can proceed to change the registry change. But if the message comes out of the blue sky while you are using the internet, better to deny the registry change.
The main reason why we should prefer to use Spybot is its three components specially monitors the areas from where Spyware used to enter into our system.
Most of the anti-viruses may not have anti spyware feature in it. Whether it has or not it’s better to use Spybot search & Destroy.
