Adware is a term used to describe software that will display those advertising banners you see popup when you are on the internet. Adware programs are many times designed to also collect information about a user on his or her pc. Information collected can include browsing habits or sites visited while on the computer. Adware is different from spyware in that spyware programs typically do not get the computer owner’s permission before they install themselves. The main purpose of an adware program is to display commercial advertisements to you at pre-determined intervals and from different internet server feeds.
Like adware, spyware also comes down from the internet and sends information about the user’s habits. But one of the major differences, as mentioned previously, is that spyware installs on the user’s computer and collects information about him or her without permission. The information sent is usually just data needed for a marketing campaign but sometimes they are designed to collect confidential information from the user.
Typically these applications are not a hybrid of the two types: adware and spyware. The main difference is because spyware installs without the user knowing of its existence and adware must always get the user’s permission. So basically one runs known and the other runs unknown.
And how did these adware and spyware applications come about? Software application development is an expensive business and developers need to fund their creation somehow. Development costs continued to rise and that is when software developers began using adware from within their applications to generate revenue for development of their main products. Spyware is used in this case too and there are even some software programs that eventually became totally free as their funding was covered by the revenues generated from adware.
Adware started out so innocently. It was just a way of delivering commercials to computer users and potential customers that were shown while some other software product was being used. But then it grew into a sophisticated piece of software that can gather information about a user and the hardware and software configuration used on his or her computer. Adware today can do things like alter your browser settings and behavior and start other computer applications that will run in background and send reports pertaining to your computer activity, browsing habits, and software versions you are running.
So let’s summarize what adware and spyware do. Here are a few of their activities:
• Add links to assorted online magazines.
• Collect information about a user’s browser activity for commercial and marketing purposes.
• Updating web pages with new commercials (either adding new ones or just replacing those already there.
• Actually changing the homepage in a browser so as to display a company’s own commercial.
• Causing a computer to slow down so much that it is rendered ineffective.
• This software has at times been reported to call telephone numbers at extremely high toll costs.
• Access and take credit card information and passwords stored on the computer.
• Install icons on your computer where you will wonder where they came from.
