Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
Madurai
Thiruvananthapuram
Visakhapatnam
'Who is spying on the PC?'
|
Did you know that `secret agents' are lying in wait within your PC, waiting to spring to action the moment you go online.Read on to see how you can stop this latest scourge of the Internet age.
|
Are you a regular web surfer? Unless you have taken special precautions, it is likely that `secret agents' are lying in wait within your PC, waiting to spring to action the moment you go online. They will monitor your entire web lifestyle: which sites you visit, what your preferences are, what offbeat or kinky surfing habits you have, which are your favourite news or consumer websites, how many seconds you spend with which pop-up advertisement.
Why would anyone want to know this? Because trying to predict the surfing preferences of the world's 77 million Internet users is big business for lots of people out there. You may ask, how did the spy get into your PC in the first place. Easy enough - it happens every time you download some free software or utility. Like the soldiers hidden in the legendary Trojan Horse, most free goodies come with some tiny cookies or bits of software hidden within. The industry name for these `uninvited' guests is Ad-Ware. The popular and more accurate term is Spy-Ware. It is not feasible to create a watertight wall against such digital double-o sevens for the simple reason that if you disenable all cookies, you will miss out on a lot of legitimate and useful stuff.
Does that mean you are helpless against these invaders? The answer is `No' -- You can fight back, and protect yourself from snoopy software. You have to install special software, which will `sniff' out the spies on your hard disk and kick them out. A casual search with the Google search engine will throw up literally thousands of `online privacy softwares' that promise to catch the spies. But, it is practically impossible to decide which are the good, and the bad ones.
Indeed, it is known that some so called `spy catchers' are really spies, which will only worsen your problem. There is a general agreement that one of the best and most famous of the cyber spy busters is Ad-Aware . Till very recently, this was a freeware. But now, the publisher Lavasoft has decided to charge for the product and the latest `Version 6' costs about Rs. 2,000. However, many of the free download sites (`http://www.download.com/') are a good place to begin. Last week, CNet.com, the parent of the download.com site carried a review, which revealed that another freely downloadable spy buster called `Spybot- Search and Destroy 1.1' is available from the same download site and is every bit as good as Ad-Aware.
Spybot is made by a German company called PepiMK and quickly brings up a list of all files on your hard disk, which appear to be Ad-ware or other invaders. You can select the ones you want to destroy but retain some that are useful, like the history of websites visited which browsers such as Explorer and Netscape provide you. Spybot is 2.4 MB in size, while Ad-Aware (if you can find it) is slightly less. Download one of them and send the spies on your hard disk back to whoever sent them. Here's to happy spy busting.
A. VISHNU
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
Madurai
Thiruvananthapuram
Visakhapatnam
|
