What is Spyware?
Spyware is also able to modify your operating system settings and make your computer more vulnerable to other threats. It can track personal habits, internet activity, and even report back important sensitive information to the criminals.
Unlike viruses or worms, a spyware application will not typically copy and spread itself, but it can cause considerable damage to the system regardless of being used for commercial gain. Secretly installed spyware must be classified as highly malicious.
Other applications which may be considered as spyware even though they are installed by users intentionally, include shareware programs which report back user activity in order to serve better targeted advertisements until they pay for the full version.
The user will have to agree with this before installing the application, and because of that it cannot be considered as an illegal privacy breach. If the software application is monitoring and collecting more information than it declares it does, then it can be labeled as malicious in nature and it should be removed as soon as possible.
How Do I Get Infected?
The most common way of getting infected is by installing an application bundled with spyware. The application itself may do no harm, but the spyware add-on can.
Spyware makers are known to pay software developers to attach their malicious applications along with the original package. They will also exploit outdated security holes within the operating system as well as the user's browser. You should immediately update the two and check for new updates on a regular basis.
Infection symptoms include serious performance loss, frequent operating system crashes and freeze-ups. The computer can even become unable to boot up the operating system. This will usually happen when the computer is infected with too many malicious applications. Sometimes only a complete operating system re-installation must be done in order to cleanup the computer entirely.
Users often associate performance loss with outdated hardware. In most cases, they are wrong.
How to Remove Spyware
Almost all of the modern security software packages come with an anti-spyware module. One of the best features in a top quality security software application is real time protection. This means that the software will not only scan your system for any malicious threats upon purchase, it will also shield you from any security breach attempts in the future.
Proactive or real time defense is an incredibly handy feature since the condition of your operating system will not be affected in the meantime. Although you will obviously have to update and completely scan your computer periodically in order to make sure that no newer undetected threats are present, real time protection is probably the most important capability in a high quality security application.
Please see the Top Rated AntiVirus Software guide for more information and feature comparison between the most popular security suites.
If you are unable to purchase a top rated security software at the moment, you will still be able to protect yourself to a degree by installing any or all of the top rated free anti-spyware removers. Some of them even come with real time protection modes.
Also, in this case, a free anti-virus is a must. Despite the fact that the active protection module is most likely to be disabled in the free version, you can still scan your computer for any possible threats at will.
For more information on spyware, take a look at the wikipedia spyware page.