Hampshire College

The terms adware and spyware are often used interchangeably, but they differ from each other in their behavior. Adware, though annoying, may not have much effect on your computer's performance. It usually involves the delivery of banner or popup ads.

Next to viruses, spyware is one of the most common threats to the security of your computer. It usually is found in small programs that come along with shareware applications. The spyware commonly reports various statistics back to its host company without your permission. Sometimes spyware has no visible effect on your computer, but more often it makes your system slow down considerably, makes it less stable and causes countless other problems. Some spyware can even report keystrokes back to its server, including passwords and financial information.

The only way to effectively remove spyware is to use a tool such as Lavasoft’s Ad-aware or Spybot Search and Destroy. There is a free version of Ad-aware available for personal use, which can be downloaded from Lavasoft’s website
( www.lavasoft.com/ or www.download.com ) Hampshire College does not license this software for the institution, so it should not be installed on school-owned computers. Spybot Search & Destroy is shareware. Find the latest installer on the Spybot site ( www.safer-networking.org/en/download/index.html ). In general, you'll want to update the Spybot database of threats and scan your system every few weeks, or as often as you feel it necessary.

Beware of other programs that claim to remove adware and spyware, as these often are spyware themselves, or try to force you to pay to have the threats removed. At this time, you should not have to pay for removal, as the programs listed above are free for personal use.