Keep your guard down for just a few seconds these days when you’re connected to the World Wide Web and you could well be in trouble.

It’s not just the incredible bundle of spams that pour down the pipes, and fresh breeds of viruses ready to blat you, but pesky spyware too, which can slow down your machine significantly. Worse than that, some of these nuisances data mine all sorts of stuff on your PC and send it goodness only knows where.

Then there’s crazies who keep bopping your machine to see if they can find a backdoor to bust in and upset your applecart.

Many people who use PCs, we suspect, are still unaware of these kind of threats and it would be useful if the bigger vendors helped the newbies out a little.

Luckily, some kindly souls have released freeware that kills spyware or even blocks it before it can get a hold on your machine.

After using Ad Aware for a while, we took some sound advice and tried out Spyware Blaster and Spybot Search and Destroy.

The first of these effectively prevents well known brands of spyware from sneaking into your PC, and you can download it from here.

The second, Spybot Search & Destroy, scours your hard drive to pick up the spyware that’s somehow got installed, and you can find that here.

Both of these programs are regularly updated by their authors to detect the new types of burglary and mayhem devised by the baddies.

Source: The Inquirer