-: Spyware. You've probably heard the term spyware
before, but what exactly is it?
Well, spyware is a type of malicious software
that's installed on your system and gathers information
about you without your consent.
Normally, this will be installed from a website
or some third-party software
that you've installed on your system.
What it does is it starts looking through all of your files,
your emails, your instant messages, your calendar invites,
and whatever other information you might have
on your system, and it gathers that all up
and builds a profile on you, that's the best case.
In the worst case, it may include a keylogger, too.
Now, with a keylogger, this is going to allow that program
to capture any keystrokes you make on a victim machine.
So if you're typing in a website name and your username
and your password, it can collect that
and send it back to the attacker.
It even has the ability to take screenshots
of what you're seeing on the screen, and send that back
at routine intervals through email or instant message.
Keyloggers are very dangerous
to your security, as you can see.
Now, on the best case, spyware may just be trying
to spy on you so it can figure out
what advertisements you should be seeing.
And when we see this, it's called adware.
Adware is a specific type of spyware
where it's going to display advertisements to you,
based on what it saw when it spied on you.
So if it looked through your emails and your websites
and your cookies and your browser history,
it could start figuring out maybe
that you're interested in weddings.
Maybe you're getting married this June.
Well, if that's the case,
you might start seeing a lot more advertisements based
on wedding dresses or flowers or venues.
Or, maybe it sees that you're
really a big fan of a certain sports team.
And so now, when you go to Facebook or Twitter or Google,
you start seeing things for your favorite sports team.
Again, they're trying to advertise things to you,
because when you click on those things,
they make some money, that's the idea behind adware,
and it is considered a subcategory of spyware.
The last category I want to talk about is
what's known as grayware. Grayware isn't really good
and it isn't really bad, it's kind of in the middle.
Grayware is some kind of software that's usually used
to make something behave improperly
without any serious consequences.
For example, there's one called Crazy Mouse,
that if you start this program on your friend's computer,
the mouse will start jumping over the screen.
And so, if you're trying to click on your My Computer icon
in the upper left, the mouse will jump down
to the lower right corner and not click on My Computer.
There's another one that's based
on the way the screen is shown,
and if you start this program,
your screen will become a mirror image,
making it hard for somebody to do their work.
This is just a joke, and it's something that can be funny,
but again, it's not really good, it's not really bad,
and so we term this jokeware, or grayware.