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These people will steal anything, from your extremely important and serious information such as your bank account details and password or social security numbers to apparently less serious details like your email passwords, online purchasing habits, searching habits and browsing habits. Everything you do or look at is worth something to someone. For this reason these people of the internet under world will go out of their way to quietly relieve you of this data.

"So what if someone knows where I shop or what sites I visit?" I hear you ask. The answers bring nothing but more questions: what else are these people and their spyware programs stealing from you? or worse yet ask yourself what damage could a stranger inflict on you with this stolen information?   I shudder to think of the possibilities of what someone could do with my information.
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What can you do to protect yourself? There are numerous ways for these programs to get onto your PC such as through emails, unfriendly web pages or through the careless downloading of apparently harmless (and often free) programs off the Internet. Everyday in many more ways then I can describe these people are trying to get your data so you need to prepare yourself and your PC to fight back.

To protect your home email from Spam and spyware you should use software that uses advance Bayesian Filtering. Bayesian (bÄ?' zÄ“-en) is described by webopedia.com as "A technique for identifying incoming e-mail Spam. Unlike other filtering techniques that look for Spam-identifying words in subject lines and headers, a Bayesian filter uses the entire context of an e-mail when it looks for words or character strings that will identify the e-mail as Spam. Another difference between a Bayesian filter and other content filters is that a Bayesian filter learns to identify new Spam the more it analyzes incoming e-mails." This amazing technology actually analyses your mail and decides on a case-by-case basis whether or not it is Spam! I have used Spam Bully in the recent past but now I am partial to PALSpam Killer.  In some case the software manufacturer promises 99% removal, but I have came to expect and be happy with a removal rate around 95%.

For your web downloads and online browsing you should definitely use an anti-spyware program like the well rated NoAdware or the excellent Spyware Nuker. These programs monitor your PC while you are online and will actively block pop up ads and other annoying or malicious programs from running. This method of doing things ensures that your PC stays cleaner for longer. Some other well-known spyware and adware removal tools are Ad-Aware and Spybot - Search & Destroy. I like to be on the safe side of things so I run a combination of the Spyware Nuker and NoAdware. No removal tool is perfect so I run them one after the other and generally speaking one will find a few problems which I fix and then the other will find a few more. In the end though I am fairly confident that my PC is bug free.

These programs combined with a software or hardware firewall and a good anti virus (I love Symantec's anti virus product) should leave your PC clean and more importantly keep prying eyes out of your personal information. Are you brave enough to see how many bad unfriendly programs live on your PC? Download one of the programs mentioned above or one that you have heard of elsewhere and scan your PC ASAP. Tell your family and friends or email them a link to this article so they can read about the risks they face, everyone is at risk...everyone.

le Perdu is a contributing author on http://www.Quampha.com a growing site dedicated to random reading, obscure articles and some rather out there opinions. We dare to be different, and we are always looking for more authors.