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The Differences Between Spyware And Adware

A comparison of two closely related subjects.

Back before there was Google, the big new search engine out there was AltaVista. In an effort to show off its power, the AltaVista team from Digital decided to crawl and index the entire web, which was a new concept at the time. There were many who didn't like the idea of a "robot" program accessing every page on their web sites because it would cause more load time to their web servers and increase bandwidth costs for them. To address their growing concerns, in 1996 the Robots Exclusion Standard was created.

You can use a simple text file called robots.txt to keep search engines out of a directory.

So many people will use the term spyware and adware together as if they are exactly the same thing. However, the thing that people need to know is that sure, they are both invading your privacy in some ways but what you may not already know is that their intents are much different in several different ways.

Spyware is much worse than adware because it's main intents are truly done in a malicious manner. Spyware is trying to get your personal information such as, your banking account numbers, passwords to your emails or other members only websites, possibly your credit card account numbers, along with your social security numbers, where in fact it can just steal your identity, a small piece at a time, without you knowing anything about it. It is invisible and has the ability to not only damage your computer system and it's performance but worse than that, it can also create many unwanted heartaches in your life.

Adware is not normally invisible like spyware, it creates itself in such ways as pop up advertisements. These advertisements may be trying to sell you something and when doing so you will then give it personal information it may need, allowing it the ability to give this information to many manufacturers trying to sell you their products. Most of the time adware will ask you to download something and ofcourse it will be offered to you, free of charge. Another little trick up it's sleave in getting what it wants from you, with your permission. How clever is that? Using firewalls will indeed help prevent a lot of this from occurring. You will find that there are several different firewalls available for your needs. Your firewall will give you an advanced warning when it figures out that this sort of thing is happening, allowing you the opportunity to stop it.

Trying to protect yourself is one of the most important things you can remember with all of this. There are options available to you online for free or software that you may be able to purchase that would best suit the needs of your computer system. Whatever you do, just remember that spyware and adware are not going away any time soon, they are growing more and more each year, unfortunately. The only things that you can do is try and prepare yourself for when in fact it happens to you. By installing a spyware detection program or using your anti virus program that most computer systems already come with, you are helping in preventing these kinds of problems from happening, the best that you can anyway. Keep your fingers crossed and maybe someday we will be rid of these types of irritating, security threatening occurrences. As long as computers are around though, I seriously doubt that they will just go away. Perhaps technology will advance enough so that we are able to protect ourselves more than we can now.

by Peter Cheongkh - Professional engineer in IT Industry
source: http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=720343