The figure of the spy has been customary in film and literature. Types mysterious able to go anywhere unnoticed and extremely intelligent. Their mission: to collect information and send it. As a fictional character, are attractive, but it sure would not want to live forever with the suspicion that there is someone in your home, you can not see and is responsible to report on everything you do in your everyday life.
In the computer world this is what we call spyware (spyware), these are installed on our system in order to steal our data and spy our movements through the network. They then send that information to Internet advertising companies to market with our data. They work as ‘background’ so that we do not realize they are until they start to appear the first symptoms.
They have some similarity with the adware as they interact with the user through toolbars, pop-up ads and other actions, but its purpose is to spy on our behavior on the Internet.
How to enter our PCs?
- When visiting websites that we download malicious code (ActiveX, JavaScripts or cookies) without our consent.
- Accompanying a virus or a Trojan called
- Being hidden in a program (freeware) which by accepting their conditions of use (almost always in English and not read) we are accepting to fulfill their roles as spies
What information can we draw?
They can access eg to: Your email address and password, IP and DNS address, telephone number, country visits and pages you’re looking for and what issues interest you, what times you are in and how often they return, what software you have and which discharges, which do shopping online and most important data like your credit card and bank accounts.
The 5 main symptoms of infection are:
- We change the home page alone, error and browser search.
- We open windows pop-ups everywhere, even without being connected and without having the browser open, most are of pornographic items.
- We open windows pop-ups everywhere, even without being connected and without having the browser open, most are of pornographic items.
- Fake alert messages in the Windows bar (near the clock) of supposed infections we can not eliminate and / or abduction of our desktop wallpaper.
- The web browsing is slower each day, several times never get to show the website that we want to open.