The U.S. alone has 220 million internet users, that’s a 130.9 % increase since the year 2000, more people are connecting to the internet every year to conduct business, shop, pay bills and seek friendship and pleasure. The internet is a broad and vast market place with something for everyone, including identity thieves, who prey upon the unknowing and often careless users who may have little or no concern for computer identity theft.

With the faster and always on internet connections available today, online identity scams abound and speed and convenience, not security, are the main focus of marketing efforts by most ISP (Internet Service Providers) companies.

Internet users often store their information on their computers and these computers do not always have the adequate protection needed to prevent viruses and spyware programs from infecting their systems. Some of the information that these programs are able to gather are your name, address, social security number, credit card numbers and whatever else you keep stored on your local drive. With this information it is very easy for an identity thief to commit credit card theft by visiting the website of any one credit card company to apply for credit with your information. This applies to everyone from working professionals to stay at home moms, to children, the elderly and even the deceased. If their information is stored on a hard disk and that system is unprotected they are at high risk.

There are millions of identity theft cases reported every year and the majority of them occur online. Internet users are constantly compromising the security of their identities and need to embrace the concept of identity theft prevention and computer security while working online.

What is spyware?

Spyware is the type of software that is typically installed on your system without your knowledge with the sole purpose of changing your computer’s safety feature configurations or collecting your identity information. This is one of the preferred methods for identity thieves to gain access to your personal information. Typically spyware is downloaded and installed on your system quietly when you visit websites that automatically send you this software or it can also be installed along with other applications that you get for free, particularly if they’re pirated.

What exactly does spyware do?

One of the many things spyware can do is provide the necessary information for online thieves to commit identity fraud. Spyware will run as a background process and in a very stealth mode so you don’t know what’s going on. The spyware may be in the form of a keylogger, which records any information you type on your keyboard especially when you’re online paying bills or accessing your bank account. It may also be a program that opens up your computer by disabling firewall and antivirus software, making it easier for a hacker to gain access to your computer.

How to recognize spyware

Because spyware has been around for a very long time, the authors of this type of software have a lot of experience particularly with windows systems which is what spyware software targets, so over the years the software has gotten more sophisticated and it is more difficult to identify on your computer system. But some of the symptoms your computer may begin to show are things like:

• Drastic slow down of your computer or high CPU usage by processes that are not associated with any applications installed on your system.
• The home page on your browser is changed to a website you may never have visited before.
• New program icons appear on your start menu, desktop or systray.
• Random errors pop up on your desktop while you’re running normal operations but the errors are bogus or have little or no explanation in the dialect.
• New toolbars appear on your browse window.
• You notice registry keys that contain URLs to sites you don’t recognize.
• Unexpected redirects to other websites when you click on your bookmarks or type a URL in the address window.
• Your program icons open up other programs that you know were not installed by you.

Protecting your computer system from spyware and identity fraud

The only sure way to battle spyware and protect your self from computer identity theft is to make use of reliable anti-spyware software. Anti-virus software does not take care of spyware, so a separate subscription to anti-spyware is necessary for adequate protection. Just like your virus software, spyware protection software must be updated with new signatures constantly for it to be effective.

Spyware is just another tool that puts your identity in danger and it’s basically another aspect you must address if you want to keep your identity from being stolen. Identity scams can easily happen even if you don’t visit suspicious websites or install pirated software. Using the proper tools to protect your computer system from these malicious programs is an important step in identity theft prevention.