What’s the whole purpose of Spyware? What’s the objective?
These are some of the questions many of those who are still not too familiar with what spyware is keep on asking.
Firstly one need to understand what spyware is. Spyware is simply computer software that secretly collects personal information about users without them being aware of what’s going on.
Quite often gathering and recording this information in a number of ways accomplishes this. This includes monitoring logging keystrokes, which enables somebody to easily tell your password. It also includes monitoring web browsing history and scanning documents and data on the PC hard drive.
Now moving to the objectives, they quite often vary a lot. The most obvious is theft and fraud. This is easily achieved by obtaining passwords and financial information using spyware software.
This next purpose will surprise many. Believe it or not spyware is still very widely used for marketing purposes. In this case the victim’s web search history is carefully recorded and what follows is a flood of unsolicited offers, and other times annoying pop ups and pop under ads based on your browsing history. Many spyware programs will usually carefully track the web sites a use visits and then sends the data to an online advertising agency.
Spyware is a term that was first used in 1995 and is these days used alongside words like Malware and Adware which also mean more or less the same thing.
You will have noted from this article that whatever the objective of the spyware in your PC it is not for your good and can in fact be quite damaging.
