Terms for Spyware Land

Definitions

Hijackers: These are the programs that will change your home page to another site, usually a porn site, but not always. Hijackers can be easy or difficult to remove.

Keyloggers: These stealthy programs record every keystroke a user makes and can send the information to the culprit that planted the software. Keyloggers come in many forms and some are even supposed to be helpful. (Yeah, sure.)

Trojans: This is a program masquerading as something helpful but in reality is probably introducing a virus onto your computer.

Worms: These are similar in nature to a virus and are closely related. Worms can infect computers from a network and do not have to have help from a person to do their dirty work.

Rootkits: Can be a set of programs that can be used to monitor traffic and keystrokes; create a backdoor into the system for the hacker's use; alter log files; attack other machines on the network; and alter existing system tools to circumvent detection. Rootkits are an extreme form of System Modification Software. This definition is from The Anti-spyware coalition, http://www.antispywarecoalition.org/

There are some free programs to eliminate spyware, but the fact of the matter is, no one program will catch and remove it all. We need at least three removers and sometimes more! The free programs do find and remove most of the spyware, but there are some really nasty things out there that require a full blown super scanner that require programmers full time researching on how to remove the stuff. So that means commercial products as folks just can't spend all their time working for free; they have to earn a living!