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DEAL WITH SPYWARE

SPYWARE/MALWARE/FOISTWARE/SCUMWARE. Whatever name you call it, this category of problems is gaining height on most people's radar at this point.

Although Ad-Ware is how it began, ad marketing was just a nusiance and small privacy concern until the methods morphed into something uglier. A lot of things get lumped into the spyware category, including certain viruses, remote control programs, cookies, rootkits, and pop-up spam ads.

In the not-so-distant past, instead of just the marketers who exploited weaknesses in Microsoft browsers and operating systems to try to get you to buy their product, malicious hackers found they could use some of these weaknesses to do innumerable bad things to your machine.

Due to these flaws in Internet Explorer browser, clicking on the wrong link could allow a program to download and sometimes install on your computer. It could be a key logger, a virus/worm, or more likely it was a program that turned your machine into the affectionately termed 'zombie' - where your machine would be used in conjunction with other zombies to attack other computers by bombarding them with data en masse. Or, perhaps the program ran an illegal web-server under your nose sharing porn or music, all at night while you slumbered peacefully unaware... your uncaring full-time broadband connection blissfully moving data back and forth as instructed.

But then something extraordinary happened... Microsoft saw that alternative browsers without these exploitable flaws were gaining popularity. So, in a bold move to protect users, MS fixed a lot of these problems and IE is now much safer than it used to be. Plus, people started learning about spyware removal programs, and even MS came out with one. You need spyware removal programs as a preventative measure, just like antivirus software. So research, download, and install at least two separate spyware removal tools, because some find what others' miss.