Symptoms of Malware
(Adware / Spyware / Viruses / Trojans / Worms)

    Fortunately, there are a number of ways that you can spot spyware / adware in action.  Below are some tip-offs:

- Your computer wants to get online just after you boot up your computer or for seemingly no apparent reason.  Sometimes, your internet dialer will just pop up every few minutes, wanting to get online.

- If you have a good firewall, such as Zone Alarm or Zone Alarm Pro, you see a popup window showing a program that wants to get onto the internet.  Things to look for include “BackWeb”, trojans, porn utilities, and others.

- Unusually large numbers of popup ads when you are online, unless you are on an already ad-ridden site, such as CNN, many sections of Yahoo, AngelFire, and Tripod.

- VERY slow system performance (a 1 GHz PC being as slow, if not slower, than a very old 386-based PC!).  This is particularly true if your system is very slow even after you reboot your system.

- Ads popping up on your screen even when you are not online.

- Programs installing and running that you have no recollection of ever installing

- “New” toolbars appearing in Internet Explorer, Netscape, and/or Outlook Express.  Bad ones include “HotBar” and “Search Mall”, and “MySearch”

- Sexual explicit toolbar(s) appearing in Internet Explorer, Netscape, and/or Outlook Express

- Your homepage gets changed without your input or consent.

- You frequently get taken to sites that are different than the URL that you typed in.

- You get new and unexpected icons popping up on the screen.

- You may get random error messages, seemingly for no apparent reason.

- One or more keys fail to work or work differently than they should (very unusual).

- File loading and saving become much more sluggish than usual.

- You lose a lot of hard drive space and/or memory for apparently no reason.