What is Malware?
Malware is a generic term for all negative programs installed on your computer that are not considered viruses. Virus programs are characterized by their will to spread to other computers – they often perform actions to your hard drive or email that cause them to be sent further along the Internet in an attempt to infect more people’s hard drives.
Malware, on the other hand, wishes to remain in the shadows – its goal is to only infect your computer in the form of spyware and adware, which record data from your actions and documents on your computer in order to target you for identity theft or targeted advertisements to win over your purchases.
You can get malware on your computer simply by opening up a bad email attachment or visiting a website that installs a small program without your knowledge. Despite the efforts that many computer companies have done to reduce the amount of malware that can be installed on your computer, it is still all-too-common to find that you have been infected with a great deal of malware simply from visiting a few websites online.
Malware is one of the leading causes of identity theft. These forms of spyware programs work by recording things like keystrokes and visited websites in order to steal personal information, such as credit card numbers, social security numbers, and anything else that they can use to steal your money and identity.
It also collects data on your buying and browsing habits in order to gauge your general interests so that it can target you for products that it knows you may be interested in. It can even turn your computer into a non stop advertisement, causing pop up ads that occur every few minutes, regardless of the sites you visit.
Because malware involves multiple tiny programs sending information back and forth in order to record and send the data, it can slow down your computer and cause your Internet to work less effectively. So even if you are able to avoid some of the most harmful malware that is known to steal your identity, you are still very likely to have a computer that is going to badly suffer because of the multiple, hidden programs that are attempting to access your memory at the same time.
The most difficult aspect of malware is that it is difficult to remove on your own. Most of the programs have very effective masking techniques, so they will not show up in your list of installed programs. In order to remove the malware from your computer, you need to use some type of specialty methods that can help you identify all of the malware that is currently affecting your computer so that you can remove it safely.
Not all malware is going to steal your idenity, but all malware is harmful to your computer and can use the data it gathers to heavily impact your online experience. If you notice that your computer is slowing down or it has been a while since you have run a malware check on your computer, you are going to want to see if you have malware installed on you computer soon before valuable personal data has been stolen.
