According to recent statistics, about 95 percent of all the PCs in the world have some form of spyware. Interestingly, over 90 percent of these computer users have no idea that they are infected. The problem of spyware programs is due to the fact that spyware programs get installed in very sneaky ways to your computer system. In addition, a lot of people lack good preventive solutions to resolve this problem.

Consider for example how spyware programs get installed. There are a variety of ways that this can be done. One of these is through the offering of supposedly free programs. Once you download these free programs and try to install them, a spyware component is installed as well in the process. This form of spyware is very difficult to detect and may run as long you have the ‘free’ programs installed in your system. Sometimes even after an un-installation, the spyware component will remain embedded in your system. Some other forms of spyware programs will neither require a user to click a button nor install an application. This occurs when some malicious programs bait a search engine to make it look as though it contains interesting content. Alternatively, these web sites may use a misspelling of a popular web site and lure visitors into them. Once a user lands on the page, the infection occurs. These web sites exploit bugs in Internet Explorer by making use of ActiveX controls.

Spyware programs are also spread via e-mail. Since mail programs like Outlook Express and Microsoft Outlook receive messages either as plain text, rich text or HTML, it is possible for a HTML document header to contain a code that calls a malicious script. In fact, it is not even necessary to have a user read an infected message to get infected. Just having the message displayed on the preview pane is enough to execute the script. However, newer versions of Outlook have limited this form of attack.

Because a lot of people rely on the anti-virus programs to detect and kill spyware programs, this kind of solution is usually not effective since the anti spyware capabilities built into these anti virus programs tend to be mediocre at best. Anti virus programs may detect some spyware programs but in most cases, they will ignore the spyware bulk out there on the net. Thus, if you need to protect yourself from spyware programs, consider purchasing a commercial third-party anti-spyware.