Like the wooden horse of The Iliad, the digital
"Trojan horses" of today enter quietly, often as gifts. And just like
that wooden horse, they hide forces ready to break out and take over.
Steve Gibson, a leader in system privacy issues, has coined the term "spyware"
for one class of Trojan horses. Spyware is inserted into your system by commercial
applications. It then phones home and talks with its masters.
If you're fortunate, all spyware does is tell its makers
where you've been surfing, so they can target you for advertisements. If you're not
so lucky, it opens connections to the Internet without your knowledge or permission,
so its masters can use your computer's system resources or even read your private files.
Spyware invades your privacy, consumes your system resources, causes system slowdowns,
and sometimes causes system crashes. And it rarely announces its presence.
Here's some great help, the free
Ad-aware
from Lavasoft, to rid your system of spyware quickly and automatically.
(Please read carefully about it before downloading and installing.)
We use Ad-aware in conjunction with paid-license commercial products to be as sure as possible of eliminating all spyware from our computers. So, we've had a good long opportunity to compare Ad-aware against other anti-spyware applications. Ad-aware works. In the years we’ve used Ad-aware — even during the several months that Ad-aware’s designers did not offer updates to its anti-spyware files — our paid-for applications found nothing significant that Ad-aware did not find as well.
Use of any application linked to herein is subject to the limitations set forth
by its respective owner(s)
All applications linked to are offered free to the public as of July, 2003.
