IT Professionals

Protecting Against Spyware In Vista Part I

Posted by on Jun 10, 2008 | 3 Comments

It used to be that IT Professionals only had to worry about viruses and worms. However, today’s IT Professionals also have to worry about spyware and its long lost cousin, adware.

Syware and adware programs usually come as a part of legitimate shareware, but hide themselves in such a way that you do not always know when they are being installed. They just sit in the background and drain system resources, either displaying advertisements or worse, reporting system activity back to a central location. Marketers use information gathered from these programs to target pop-up ads and spam.

Spyware does more than just send information. Since spyware is often poorly written, it can cause programs, such as Internet Explorer, to crash. It can also take over the settings of programs to display ads or redirect Web pages. Because spyware runs in the background, it can also degrade overall system performance, especially on workstations that are already near the base system requirements of an operating system.

Spyware doesn’t always take the form of a separate program. Sometimes it can be a simple tracking cookie used by a Web site or e-mail. Common spyware includes:

  • BonziBuddy
  • Alexa
  • WildTangent
  • OpaServ
  • AdMonitor

In this series of articles, I will show you different ways of protecting your computer against spyware. We will look at Windows Defender, which is included with Vista, and a third party anti-spyware program called Spybot-S&D.

  • Toby Bennett

    Wild Tangent — spyware? the propaganda still goes on.. ..

  • Sid Gilbert

    I had to laugh when I saw Wild Tangent listed in your article. I agree wholeheartedly and commend you for not caving in to Alex St John’s rantings. I have made a lot of money cleaning his ‘crapware’ off of computers, and his column in CPU magazine is why I let my subscription expire. It was a close call, because Chris Pirillo also writes for CPU, but I just got so tired of St John whining and blaming Microsoft for all the troubles of the world. Kudos to you for having the guts to call this program what it really is!

  • Brent Smith

    I also laughed when I saw Wild Tangent listed in your article because I also have made a lot of money cleaning crapware off of small business PCs and home users. But not because of Wild Tangent in recent times. A lot of the gaming software can cause issues at one time or another on a particular PC setup. But in general, I have not had any issues with Wild Tangent causing more issues on a persons PC than other gaming software in the same class. I am not realy a huge fan of the software, but if the user wants it bad enough and it isnt causing an issue, I see no reason in leaving it. There is a tradeoff in a lot of software. Each person needs to decide if it is worth it to him. But Wild Tangent in the same sentence as BonziBuddy ? I don’t see it.