How to Protect Yourself from Viruses, Adware, Spyware and Hackers

Spyware/adware is a new major concern for PC users everywhere. Infecting your computer silently (usually installed with programs that seem harmless), spyware and adware can collect personal information about you, as well as cause pop up ads to come up all of the time, changing your browsers home page, sometimes even completely disabling your computer's usability.

The first thing you can do, if you're an Internet Explorer user, is consider making a switch to the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Plus it is almost completely spyware “proof”, and is much more stable and secure than Internet Explorer. To do so, you'll want to download all available updates from windowsupdate.microsoft.com (if you use Firefox, you will need to fire up IE to do this since Microsoft doesn't like people to use other browsers, so they have “banned” Firefox from accessing Windows updates).

Now that you've got a secure browser and have Windows up to date, it's time to talk about the anti-spyware software. The following is a list of the top three players in the free anti-spyware software game:

Spybot Search & Destroy
Download from: safer-networking.org
If you're only going to download one program, get this. Spybot is known as the king of spyware removal – and is completely free, ran buy a guy who volunteers his free time to keeping Spybot up to date.

Lavasoft's Ad-Aware
Download from: lavasoftusa.com
Ad-Aware is technically a for-profit program, but they have a freeware version of their paid software, which is just as good, in my opinion. Microsoft's Newly Released Anti-Spyware
Downlaod from: microsoft.com
Not a must-have if you have the above two programs, but it actually is a pretty good program