SpyWare, the silent thief.

April 25, 2003

SpyWare - the Silent Thief

Dan Taylor
IDSA
Dan@DanTaylor.com
www.DanTaylor.com Dan Taylor
1543 Bayview Avenue, # 407
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4G 3B5
+1 416-925-1668 Telephone
+1 416-921-2442 Facsimile

Dan Taylor is an entrepreneur living in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He is an industrial designer and technologist. His advice on e-commerce, the Internet, economic development, high technology, infrastructure, water and energy issues is actively sought by leaders in academia, business and government.

I am often asked about computer security for personal computers. Computer users seem to think that hackers have targeted them specifically so they correctly install top notch antivirus (like Norton) and a firewall (like the very good ZoneAlarm) software. Well I have news for them, most hackers are not interested in a few specific users or targets. Hackers like volume.

As of this writing, I believe that the most unrecognized danger on the internet to a user is SpyWare. SpyWare is insidious. It transmits information about a computer user without their knowledge and consent. It could be personal or demographic information, such as your gender, visited web sites, passwords, age, any data that is currently on your computer or has been created on your computer and mailed or deleted, financial information or e-mail address. It is an open door to identity theft. Pretty scary stuff.

So now that you are aware of the problem, I will tell you to: first, delete all of your cookies on a weekly or more often basis and: second, AdAware and Spybot Search and Destroy are the 2 free and effective SpyWare hunters that I most often recommend to people. Both are absolutely free and very effective. The AdAware takes much longer to run but is worth running once a week when you go to lunch and Spybot typically takes 4 minutes to run. Run Spybot every day when you take a coffee break and AdAware on Fridays when you go to lunch.

FireFox is a great browser to use and has many built in effective security features. I strongly recommend ThunderBird for your mail program too for the same reasons. Both FireFox and ThunderBird are open source an platform independant. That is a very good thing.

Believe me, you had better protect your privacy because once it is gone it is hard to regain.