I listened to his horror story with a sympathetic ear, but I felt secure since I carry anti-virus software and a firewall (both by Norton).

At his suggestion - and to my surprise - I ran a program called "Spy Sweeper" and found a veritable minefield of dangerous and harmful programs lurking on my computer.

"Spyware" is software that gets onto your computer and literally "spies" on your activities.

The spying can range from relatively harmless use of cookies tracking you across multiple websites... to extremely dangerous "keystroke loggers" which record passwords, credit cards, and other personal data. That data then gets relayed to person who put software on your computer.

Three primary types of spyware exist to complicate your online life, including:

1. "cookies" 2. "adware" 3. malicious programs like "keystroke loggers"

Cookies represent mostly a danger of lost privacy.

In theory, someone could use a "cookie" to track you across multiple sites, combine that data with several databases, and figure out a lot more information about you than would make you comfortable.

"Adware" tracks more than just your movement across sites, it spies on your installed software and computer habits to then serve up advertising, modify websites before you see them, and generally do things without your knowledge with intention of trying to get you to buy things.

"Keystroke loggers" and other malicious programs exist for one purpose: to cause personal mayhem and financial damage.

Spyware gets on your computer in one of several different ways.

First, it rides along with software you download from 'Net and install on your system.

When you take first step into scary world of business online everything seems to be against you and very, very unnerving . You search a few forums and get hit with sentences like “ search engine optimisation “ , “ reciprocal links “ or “ meta tags “ and all of a sudden you are cast into harsh world of computers when you have to learn a whole new language just to move forward. Well, here I go and try and make those first few steps a little easier with aid of some of most useful sites and pieces of information I have found.

Me

I am not an expert, just an average bloke who wanted to work for himself and have a bit of freedom with his work and now my workplace.

My first site was based on a friend of mine’s unfortunate redundancy from an optical factory which used to make lenses for some of high end sunglasses market telling me that there was an enormous profit to be had by buying fashion sunglasses and selling them on. I tried for over three months to get these factories I had found on internet to sell me a selection at wholesale price but at every corner I was given an absolute no!, not to be put off I went way of replica sunglasses and found opposite happened and everyone wanted me to buy from them, great , I found my supplier’s, now all I had to do was sell them.

The 1st step