Nine Ways to Wipe Out Spyware

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From [url=\"http://www.pcmag.com/\"]PCWorld[/url]

We've rounded up the best (and worst) of the apps dedicated to finding and killing spyware—and keeping it from getting onto your machine in the first place. Not all antispyware apps are created equal!

by Neil J. Rubenking

The goal of antispyware software is extremely simple. If any kind of malicious software is present on the system, the antispyware app should remove every trace. And if the system is clean, the app should prevent malicious software from installing. Simple. The hard part is making it happen.

There's a little confusion over the different coverage areas for antispyware and antivirus. A number of the standalone products have solved this question by incorporating antivirus protection. Here's the lowdown: A computer virus is very specifically a program that "infects" other programs with its own code. When an unsuspecting user launches an infected program, the virus looks for more programs to infect. A worm is like a virus, but it can spread without requiring a user to launch it. Both of these lie squarely in the antivirus camp.

The term spyware is actually a catch-all for a variety of nonvirus malicious software (malware, for short). Trojan horse programs masquerade as something useful—games, screen savers, utilities—but actually have their own sneaky agenda. One especially pernicious type of Trojan pretends to be an antispyware utility. These rogue antispyware programs tend to be alarmist, reporting tons of threats and offering to remove them—for a price. The term adware refers to programs that display ads on your computer (independent of the built-in banner ads on Web pages). Spyware literally spies on you, gathering personal information and sending it to the lair of its evil creator. Keyloggers specifically records all the keys you type, thereby capturing passwords and other sensitive info. Some of these may use rootkit technology to escape detection. A good antispyware program will handle all of these overlapping threat categories.

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