If you think your computer may be watching you, you might be right if you're infected with spyware. Spyware is malware that's watching everything that happens on your system. It may be putting advertising on your screen, stealing your personal information, or committing affiliate fraud to earn money from purchases that you make online.
Very similar to a typical virus, spyware needs to be installed on your system, either through peer-to-peer software, fake security software, or malicious links that you might get in your email. Spyware is very good at watching everything happening on your systems. It can monitor your browsing habits and send that information back to the attacker's servers. The spyware might also install a key logger, which is watching everything that you type. This means your usernames, passwords, and everything else you type on the system is collected into a file, and that file is sent to the attacker's server.
Fortunately, most of us are running anti-malware or anti-virus software that is looking for this type of spyware to be installed on your system. And if it recognizes that spyware is there, it will stop it from executing. It's also a good idea to research everything that you might be installing on your system. Each installation is an opportunity for malware to install itself on your system, so you should always make sure that you're using known, good, and trusted software. This malicious spyware code works very hard to embed itself within your operating system.
And some versions of spyware make it very difficult to uninstall. This is why it's always a good idea to have a known good backup so that if your system is infected with malware, you can easily recover from that backup. And of course, you may want to look for this malware with third-party software like Malwarebytes, which is specifically designed to look for malware running on your system. Not only can Malwarebytes and similar software identify the spyware, in many cases, it can remove it from your system as well. Another challenge is managing bloatware.
If you've ever purchased a new computer or a new mobile device and you've turned it on for the first time, you'll notice there are a lot of popular apps that may already be installed on that system, such as your mail and your browser and other things that you would commonly expect. But it might also include applications that you didn't expect. There may be a number of applications, security tools, games, and other apps that normally would not be installed with a core operating system installation. Instead, These utilities and other applications are installed by the manufacturer of the hardware. Normally, the hardware manufacturer is getting paid to include this software on these systems that they're distributing.
And of course, you, the end user, are left with what is probably a number of unnecessary applications already installed onto this new device. There are a number of security concerns associated with bloatware. Obviously, it's going to take up room on a storage device that could be allocated to other applications.
The system may be running some of this software automatically when it starts up, and that could be affecting the overall efficiency of the operating system. And of course, any of these applications could be susceptible to a known or unknown vulnerability, making this a security concern on a device that's brand new out of the box. Obviously, one way to deal with this bloatware is to manually remove it from your system.
Unfortunately, not all bloatware provides an obvious way to uninstall. Hopefully, the bloatware is listed in the installed applications of your operating system, and you may be able to select it, click the Uninstall button, and remove it from your computer. Other apps might have their own uninstaller that you have to run from the program area for that particular application or in the Start menu of your Windows operating system.
It's become such a challenge to uninstall software that there's even third-party software designed to uninstall other third-party software. This is probably not the case. the first place you should go to uninstall the software, but it may provide you with a way to remove that code when nothing else seemingly is able to work in that operating system.
This may not be the first choice for uninstalling this bloatware, but occasionally it can help remove software when no other process seems to be working.