Sick of Spam? Prepare for Adware
The biggest threat to personal computing is neither spam nor viruses. Rather, it's the proliferation of a new category of deceptive software that takes over unwitting victims' computers for the purpose of gathering their personal information and bombarding them with unwanted advertising.
Dubbed spyware, adware, sneakware or malware -- depending on who you talk to -- these programs embed themselves deep inside a computer's operating system and spawn windows full of advertising messages, preventing users from accessing any other application. Or, they hide in the background, secretly transmitting information about the user's Web-surfing habits to a server somewhere on the Internet. If the user tries to delete the programs, they act like a cancer and replicate themselves over and over.
The fast-growing phenomenon is already responsible for more than 12 percent of all technical support calls in Dell's consumer hardware division, the biggest category of complaints this year, company representatives said. And they are not alone -- Microsoft claims half of all computer crashes reported by its customers are caused by spyware and its equivalents. The support calls are costing the company "millions," said Jeffrey Friedberg, Microsoft's director of Windows privacy.
Full Story at Wired.com
The biggest threat to personal computing is neither spam nor viruses. Rather, it's the proliferation of a new category of deceptive software that takes over unwitting victims' computers for the purpose of gathering their personal information and bombarding them with unwanted advertising.
Dubbed spyware, adware, sneakware or malware -- depending on who you talk to -- these programs embed themselves deep inside a computer's operating system and spawn windows full of advertising messages, preventing users from accessing any other application. Or, they hide in the background, secretly transmitting information about the user's Web-surfing habits to a server somewhere on the Internet. If the user tries to delete the programs, they act like a cancer and replicate themselves over and over.
The fast-growing phenomenon is already responsible for more than 12 percent of all technical support calls in Dell's consumer hardware division, the biggest category of complaints this year, company representatives said. And they are not alone -- Microsoft claims half of all computer crashes reported by its customers are caused by spyware and its equivalents. The support calls are costing the company "millions," said Jeffrey Friedberg, Microsoft's director of Windows privacy.
Full Story at Wired.com
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