The birth of spywares & adware

Pretty soon entrepreneurs figured out that they might be able to make money by bundling advertising software known as spywares or adware with their free software.

The rest as they say is history.

These days many companies do their best to get adware infested programs installed on your computer to help them make money, usually without your permission.

Some of these programs are not a problem, because they make it obvious that viewing the ads pays for a free piece of software. They only run when you are using that particular program.

Spyware, malware or Adware is a type of program that displays ads just like those on most commercial Web sites, but they are controlled by the program instead of by visiting a Web site.

The nasty ones are those that are set to start whenever you start your computer and serve ads even when you are not running the ad supported software you chose to install. Most of the bad adware keeps running even when you uninstall the software it came with.

Spywares is program code that tries to gather information about you and relay it to the company that distributed it.

The more benign of these watches what sites you visit and where you shop on the Internet in order to create a marketing profile. The most evil ones may attempt to capture credit card numbers and other sensitive information.

At the best, these programs are an annoyance. At worst, they are a severe security risk. Aside from their intended purposes, they can also have other effects. Since spywares run every time you boot your computer, they can cause slowdowns, and software conflicts which can make your computer less stable.

Fortunately, there are things you can do to make it less likely that adware or spywares gets installed on your computer. There are also ways to detect and remove the programs if they are already there.