You may have inadvertently invited a spy into your computer. There you are, shopping on line and little did you know it you caught a spy or two.The spy is known by a few names "spyware, adware, trojans". Whatever it’s called, what it does, once it's in your computer, is start taking statistical information as you travel
Internet. It may also send you pop-up ads and slow down your computer. Wired.com, http://www.wired.com/news echnology/0,1282,49960,00.html, mentioned it "could even collect your credit card information". According to “OptOut”, http://grc.com/optout.htm, one spyware program attacks your e-mail signature file.
How did you invite spy?
Maybe you've gone to a website you knew and enjoyed only to find that it was purposefully purchased by a pornography site. The new company may have imbedded "spyware" or "adware" into that new home page and now, in many cases without your knowledge, it's on your computer, too.
Maybe you've downloaded a free or paid program and as part of package you were provided with an added bonus – a spyware program.
Maybe you agreed to it! You could have downloaded a program and checked box that allows that program to take statistics from you "for their own use".
What you can do?
A firewall program should let you know when you're on a website and a program is about to download. Note word "should".
Or you can learn all about spyware, download an anti-spyware program, and schedule time in your weekly calendar to run program. What I originally found on my 18-month-old computer were: 2 porn and 42 other spyware programs. A week later, I had 4 new spyware programs appear.
To further reduce amount of spam that ends up in your e-mail, create a "rule" or "filter” that will take any e-mail containing "certain adult words of your choosing” and send those e-mails directly to your delete or spam folder.
