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The user usually doesn't know that a Spyware program is included with their software and is unaware of it running or what it is doing. Very often the installation routine of the main piece of software will not make it known that a Spyware program is being installed alongside it.
Generally speaking, Spyware is designed to exploit the infected PC for commercial gain by supplying information to online marketing agencies, with the least damaging Spyware supplying statistics on web usage, and the most damaging supplying sensitive financial data, such as online banking passwords.
Adware
Adware is a program designed to deliver adverts to your desktop, either while you are surfing the Internet, or using an application that is associated with the Adware program. Very often shareware applications are distributed with Adware programs, to display adverts until you buy the full version of the application. While some Adware is legitimate software - it displays adverts in order to fund the further development of its associated application, many Adware programs are installed without a user's knowledge and collect information about the user which they pass on to third parties. This type of Adware is very closely related to spy ware.
While the descriptions above cover most of the different categories of malware you are likely to encounter, in practice, many malicious programs incorporate aspects of different types of malware, for example, Internet worms that are responsible for installing Spyware programs on your PC once your PC is infected.
What do malware writers want to achieve?
A malware or virus writer may have many different reasons for creating their malicious programs. Sometimes it is fuelled be ego - they want to prove their technical skill to other virus writers and show how much damage and disruption they can cause. Sometimes they are motivated by financial gains - writing software that can steal bank and credit card details from an infected PC.
Very often the aim of the malicious programmer is to create a 'botnet', that is a network of infected 'zombie' PCs under the control of the malware creator. Very often the owner of an infected PC will not know that it is infected, and only find out when the performance slows down to a grinding halt. There are several reasons why a hacker may want to create a botnet. Sometimes it is to create a platform from which to launch spam campaigns - the PCs in the botnet are used as mail relays to send spam email messages out in a way that cannot be traced back to the original spammer. Instead the spam email will be traced back to the innocent user's infected PC.
Hackers also use botnets to launch distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on target websites. A DDoS attack is one where hundreds of PCs send requests to a web server simultaneously, in order to swamp all legitimate traffic from contacting the web server. Usually these attacks are aimed at a particular organisation. For example, the MyDoom worm from January 2004 launched a DDoS attack against websites belonging to Microsoft and the SCO Group, taking the latter's website offline for a brief period of time.
Why is Windows targeted?
Virus and malware writers want their malicious programs to spread as far as possible, as quickly as possible. For this reason, computers running Windows are almost always the target of their programs, not because Windows is inherently less secure than other operating systems, but because it is so popular their programs will quickly infect lots of computers around the world.Very often virus/worm writers take advantage of security holes in Windows or other applications. When Microsoft find a security flaw in Windows they very often release a patch for it. Microsoft does not always document the exact nature of the flaw, so that the virus writers cannot easily take advantage of it. There have been cases, however, where it appears that a virus writer has 'reverse engineered' a Microsoft patch, that is, worked out what the patch was actually doing to work out the flaw in Windows that it was plugging. Virus writers take advantage of the fact that many Windows users are lazy and don't install the patches that Microsoft release, and are therefore able to infect Pcs important to through a known flaw that users could have prevented. For always keep your this reason, it is important that you always keep your PC updated. Windows system up-to-date with the latest security patches. You can find the latest Windows security patches using Windows Update as follows:
