Spyware: things to know
Ed Bott tells us there are ten things you need to know about spyware.
He’s currently working on an update to his (and Carl Siechert’s) 2002 book Windows Security Inside Out. He says that the update about spyware is much more extensive than originally envisioned. No surprises there, then.
The biggest change, in my opinion, is the explosive growth in what’s commonly called spyware. We spent about four paragraphs on the topic in the first edition, basically telling readers to install a firewall and use Ad-Aware. In this edition, we’re devoting an entire chapter to spyware, and we’ll have significant coverage of related topics in at least four other chapters.
I’ve cleaned spyware off two computers manually and quite a task it was. Perhaps Ed’s most significant point is this: “There is such a thing as high-risk behavior…” some users are “…running old operating systems, with only a dim awareness of the need to do updates and a willingness to install anything”. Education, it seems, still has a long way to go.
But what Ed doesn’t say is that much spyware is installed through vulnerabilities in Windows and, in particular, Internet Explorer. If users switched to Mozilla Firefox, at least some spyware wouldn’t get through. Recently, Firefox reached 20 million downloads but is still less than five percent of installed browsers. Push that percentage up and perhaps we’ll make some inroads into the spyware problem.
He’s right, though, where it comes to prevention. Stopping spyware from installing on your PC is better than trying to remove it. If you’re relying on an older ’scan and remove’ utility, then it might be time to upgrade.
