Talk and Reviews on the ‘NET

The internet age has brought us many wonderful things like shopping from home, unlimited research capabilities, and YouTube. However, this new era has also ushered in a hidden menace: spyware and adware now infect over 90% of the world’s computers. The problem is that these digital viruses, like their biological namesake, change their structure just as quickly as programs can be written to detect and delete them.

These malicious files are also aptly named in regards to their effects on a computer’s performance. This is due to the nature of how a spyware program operates: spyware is installed on your system without your knowledge, and does not leave an icon on your desktop nor can it be deleted using Windows’ “Add or remove programs,” feature. While you browse the web, listen to music, and chat on your computer, spyware runs in the background, keeping track of everything you do and type. This information is relayed back to whatever company caused the software to be installed in the first place. When multiple spyware applications have installed themselves onto a machine, they all continue to run at the same time on top of whatever else the owner is doing. This dramatically slows down even a very fast computer.

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