Have you noticed your computers are running slower?  Take more time to boot up?  Strange pop up ads?   You have spyware.   Someone is already learning more about you than you want them to know.  Who else are they learning about from your computer?       

Most people think “VIRUS” when they think about digital threats obtained from the world wide web.  These come in the form of an e-mail or when downloading something to your hard drive.  The truth is, there’s a difference between viruses and spyware, and they can be installed on your machine without you even knowing it, and they don’t necessarily have to come in the form of a download or an e-mail.      

Most spyware and viruses are actually embedded in the code of a web site.  Simply visiting this website without the right protection allows this malicious code to be installed on your machine.  This code then can do everything from track websites you visit, allow remote control of your machine by someone you don’t know, or actually record every keystroke and mouse click you make and at the end of every business day, e-mail a log file to the code writer showing every single key stroke you’ve made for the day, and every web site you’ve visited.  This can effectively steal your credit card numbers, bank accounts, friends and families e-mail addresses or anything you can imagine typing during the course of any single day.  In the case of a business this can steal your customer’s private information which in turn puts your company at risk of legal action not only by the customer, but by the FCC.  

    
The FCC charges that any organization that maintains records of customer’s private data must protect that information.  If that information is leaked, the company found to be in violation of that rule can be fined substantial amounts of money.  The cost of alerting customers that you've lost their private information - a procedural requirement in many states - is itself nothing to sneeze at. After a hacker accessed records on 1.4 million state residents, California's Department of Health and Human Services spent $700,000 on mailing costs alone to alert the victims. Add to that the expense of offering your customers free credit monitoring and replacing the ones who flee to competitors, and a breach that exposes a mere 100,000 consumers can cost a company $23 million, according to security vendor Vontu.       

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