When your connected to the internet and your system is idle and you have pop-ups, or when you first connect to the internet pop-ups appear. Chances are your machine has ad-ware. Other indications; your home page has changed without you changing it. Your default search engine is some strange website.

Now that you have spyware what can you do to get rid of it? In our opinion there are a lot of anti-spy ware and ad-ware removal software out there, and some are just on the band wagon to sell their product, but, do little in getting rid of and correcting all the threats. We often recommend Spysweaper by webroot software. It does a good job of getting rid of most threats, and once installed will help you keep your system from getting attacked again.

When we started getting 25-35 unsolicited emails per day we began replying to the remove address', although some return addresses didn't function we did manage to connect to about 40% of the senders. Within a week we began noticing that our Email load had more than doubled, even though the original emails rarely showed back up, we kept thinking all we did was confirm that the sending address is a correct email address. Here is a list of Spam Do's and Don't's The primary rule: Never make lists of e-mail addresses, and if you do, do not e-mail the list. This is a common practice, especially among the relatively inexperienced. It happens like this -- Joe Beginner receives an interesting article and he immediately wants to mail it to all his friends -- but he does it by including all the addresses in a single posting. The problem? Each recipient gets a copy of all the addresses. Then one of Joe's friends forwards it to all his friends the same way. The address list becomes very large, and finally it falls into the hands of someone in the spam trade. Instead, Joe Beginner should mail a separate copy to each of his friends. The point is there should never be more than one address on an e-mail. Never respond to a spam e-mail. For a spammer, one "hit" among thousands of mailings is enough to justify the practice. Instead, if you want a product that is advertised in a spam e-mail, go to a Web site that also carries the product, inquire there, and tell them you do not approve of spam methods and will not patronize a company that uses spammers. Never respond to the spam e-mail's instructions to reply with the word "remove." This is just a trick to get you to react to the e-mail -- it alerts the sender that a human is at your address, which greatly increases its value. If you reply, your address is placed on more lists and you receive more spam. Never sign up with sites that promise to remove your name from spam lists. These sites are of two kinds: (1) sincere, and (2) spam address collectors. The first kind of site is ignored (or exploited) by the spammers, the second is owned by them -- in both cases your address is recorded and valued more highly because you have just identified it as read by a human. Never mail-bomb spam sites or engage in hacking to stop spammers. This only increases the amount of wasted Internet traffic, creates sympathy for spammers, and makes the Internet even less reliable than it already is. Take meaningful action to stop spammers. Filter their messages or their sites using the methods described below, write their host sites (without revealing your real e-mail address!) and any sites that are used as relays, write your congressional representatives.

In today's world as we surf the internet and depend on it for research and shopping, the chances of getting a virus is not if, but when. Sometimes it's difficult to part with the $29.95, or even as high as $49.95 for that complete internet threat prevention suite. Unfortunately, it's the cost of using the internet. Since we know it's going to happen, your best defense is keeping your virus software up to date. Depending on your level of dependence on your computer system, and the price (often in labor) to replace or recreate information, the price you'll pay for protection is well worth it, but, remember, not keeping the virus protection software up to date is the same as not having it.

We moved the collection to our software development website at http://www.intelligent-ware.com.