Detecting and Removing Spyware

Surfing, at times, may be like entering the twilight zone - you just don't know where you can contract spyware next. Spyware is harmful and also reduces the speed of your computer. What can you do to combat this malicious code?

Over the last decade the Internet has changed from being mostly a source of information into a worldwide marketplace. Today, all sorts of people and companies are trying to find new ways of making money online. Since information is critical to any kind of marketing, the Internet has also created a whole new business of gathering and selling information about possible customers. Interesting information can be anything from your surfing habits to your hobbies, name, email address and credit card details.

One method of gathering personal information that has become increasingly popular over the last few years is the use of software agents bundled with many common "freeware" programs. By downloading and installing the freeware program, you will also install a spyware agent. The spyware can then run in the background gathering information about anything you do on your computer and uploading that information to a server somewhere on the Internet. Even if the information is never used or seen by anyone, most people feel very uncomfortable with invisible processes uploading private information to the Internet.

Finding Invisible Processes

WinTasks 5 lists all processes running on your computer, including invisible background processes like spyware. Since WinTasks also assigns more user-friendly names to each process, such as Internet Explorer instead of iexplore.exe, as well as the full executable path, finding and terminating spyware processes is relatively easy.

Permanently Removing Spyware

With WinTasks 5 Professional, it is possible to prevent the spyware processes from loading the next time you reboot.To do this, you simply open the Autostart window in WinTasks and select the spyware executable. By disabling the spyware from this window, it will be removed from the registry autostart sections and will not be started the next time you reboot your system. You can either temporarily disable the spyware, to find out whether you have disabled the right program, or you can permanently remove it from the registry. In WinTasks 5 Professional there are also a number of other features like scripting and CPU usage logs that can be used to detect and remove unwanted processes and to increase overall system security.

Updates

WinTasks is updated directly from Uniblue's online library of process descriptions called processlibrary.com. Processlibrary.com is an invaluable easy-to-use website that provides comprehensive details of all of the processes running on any computer. Offered for free by Uniblue, Processlibrary.com is aimed at anyone who uses computers regularly.