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Let us take a look at their definition of what is badware. Badware is software that fundamentally disregards a user’s choice regarding how his or her computer will be used. You may have heard of some types of badware such as spyware, malware or deceptive adware.
Common examples of badware include free screensavers that surreptitiously generate advertisements, malicious web browser tool bars that take your browser to different pages than the ones you expect, or key logger programs that can transmit your personal data to malicious parties. Well some types of badware seem more annoying than dangerous. The consequences of badware infections can be quite harsh. Badware can cause computers to become slow, unresponsive or even unstable. Personal information gathered by spyware could be abused and financial or other personal data if it falls into the wrong hands can lead to identity theft. Some forms of badware steal resources instead of information, perhaps by adding your computer to a network of hijack machines called a botnet that can then use your computer to send spam and bad emails or even to help distribute it more badware. They can actually use your computer as a little server to send out more junk to other people’s computers. That is what a lot of these programs do and your computer normally is going to slow down a lot when all of its resources are being used to do something like this, and this is one of the first symptoms of knowing that you have infection. It is slowing down.
Another great website to look at is the AV Comparatives. This is a website that just takes an objective look at antivirus software. They have a limited number here, this is really the best of the best right here, this list. They have comparatives where they compare the performance of the antivirus software. The most recent ones here, August 2008, they compare programs like the antiviral premium, antivirus kit, AVK, the Avast Professional. If you remember from one of our other tutorials, we recommended the Avast for a home computer, the free version is excellent. You can see they have all got some pretty good ratings here.
Now when we get down to some of them, we find that they might only—let us say the Microsoft 1 Care for example. Well it only actually picked up about 84 % of the viruses that they threw at it. There are a number of other ones here that are rated. But this is one of the better websites to visit to get some really objective information about how the anti virus programs compare.
So we have the AV Comparatives, AVComparatives.org. We have the StopBadware.org. website. One of the neat things about this is that there is this badware clearing house and it tells you a little bit of information about the clearing house in which these partners have identified bad websites. Well they are simply malicious software that is going to try to infiltrate your computer or your network whenever you hit the website. You can actually check out websites by pasting the URL into this box and then search the clearing house to see if that particular website is a bad website and it is going to put junk on your computer that you do not want. So that is a really, really good function for this website here, plus there is just a lot of information here.
And last but not least by any means is the Spyware Warrior. It is one of the first websites to really get into this stuff and do a great job of looking at anti spyware software objectively.
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