Several years ago a story circulated that told the story of a promising law student. This woman would regularly go online and use the major search engines to do research for the paper she was working on which had to do with money laundering. Things were good until one day she went to visit websites of interest to find she was being taken to other websites that were adult in nature.

First, she just thought it was a temporary glitch that would just go away on it's own, but it turned out the problem became permanent and that's when she became a little suspicious that her computer might be bugged in some way. This young woman was dealing with the sort of bug that you cannot just fend off like other bugs. And to make things even worse, she was not very technical when it came to computers because her only use for her laptop was for doing research for her studies or assignments.

The above story is not a one off case. There are countless people who wind up getting caught up in a problem that becomes too confusing to the average computer user, but it can be summed up by two common words that are: spyware and adware. The term spyware, was actually first coined in 1995 but became popular in the year of 2000. Spyware is a term that reffers to any program that gets installed onto a computer in secret, so that it may access all of the private data of the users of the PC.

This is easily done by recording your keystrokes, and is known as "keylogging", by viewing your browser history or even by completely scanning the computers hard drive for potentially valuable data. You would think that these kinds of things would be found in an action movie, but the reality is that we can all become victims of spyware. No one wants their activities monitored online. Spwyare that could be used on criminals to spy on their activities would be a benefit to the society but the reality is that these criminals are using spyware to swipe bank account details from the innocent.

In just the US alone, identity theft is rampant and so is the theft of personal property from the unwanted transfer of ownership of goods to wrong people because of a stolen credit card number or from the unknown transfer of funds from your online banking account.

What people can do to protect themselves is to install anti-spyware software that will block and delete any of these dangerous programs hiding in your computer system and others that are really similar such as malware and adware. There are many spyware removal utilities that come with a free scan so you can see what is hiding in your PC before you make a decision about purchasing one. The main purpose of these applications is to delete any pre-existing spyware or to find them as soon as they are introduced into the computer.

Spyware, malware and adware are not like the standard virus that replicates itself to do actual harm to your computer, but they can be just as disrupting to your normal online activities. One of the most common problems people experience when they get spyware is that their computers become suddenly really slow. You may even notice that your PC takes a long time just to start up. It becomes a pain in the neck for those who have to work all day on a computer as they lose much precious time from a slower computer.

Spyware can also act similarly in a way to a virus in that it is able to change system security settings that will allow other malicious programs to come into your system. This is a much more aggressive type of spyware that can even block virus and spyware removal software from working so that you are unable to delete the program that is causing your computer harm.

For the majority, the people who create these spyware programs are never dealt with in a court of law. As new spyware threasts are created daily, it is wise to have an anti-spyware program always on hand so you are protected from any future attacks and so that your private data is secured.