Did you know that recently a Trojan Horse program was developed and used for industrial espionage?



The Trojan Horse was used in the illegal hacking into scores of computers in Israel, including computers belonging to large and leading companies. The companies involved did not know how important it was to have a spyware removal tool or tools to detect spyware. The perpetrators developed spyware programs that extracted computer files and entire directories from infected computers. This material was then sent to servers abroad. The spyware was sold to private investigators, which offered their industrial espionage services to various companies.

In this case, the perpertrators (a husband and wife team!) were eventually caught and deported. But by that time, the damage had already been done. Those corporations that had been victimized already had their sensitive corporate secrets floating around in cyberspace and who knows where else! If they had known how to detect spyware, they might be much better off.

In another case, a routine Internet activity report that was run on a large company's computer users revealed that some computers were logging thousands of hits a day to the same IP address. The web site had nothing to do with the company, and the network administrator at first thought that employees were conducting their personal business on the internet or otherwise slacking off.

After rather intense investigation, and a routine check to detect spyware, it was revealed that spyware was tracking employees' computer usage habits and was sending the information back to a third party website automatically. This company used a combination of a spyware removal tool and restricting internet access to prevent this happening to them again.

Even in large corporate environments, spyware can cause tremendous damage - it can compromise data security Spyware and significantly slow down computer performance.

The lesson here is this: if spyware/malware can compromise even the most sophisticated business computer systems, then those of us who have small businesses and even more to lose can't afford to take our internet security lightly!