What is Malware?

As with everything else I receive many questions what is Malware, Torjan, Virus, Spyware, Adware and what are the differences. Though each may seem to be the same but there are HUGE differences!

Malware is the category that Trojan, Virus, Spyware, Adware fall into. All in which could be extremely dangerous to your system! All of these are installed on your machine without YOUR consent.

Trojan which most of the time gets bundled in with other software you download. A trojan is essentially the same as the Trojan Horse in the Trojan war when they wheeled in a huge horse in and without them knowing there were men inside! A Trojan when installed on your machine becomes a backdoor for a intruder to connect to you and use your computer as if you were using it, and may also use your computer to send even MORE malicious stuff from your computer.

Virus a devastating type of malware that its main focus is to DESTROY your computer. It may be years or it may be only seconds for a virus to do its means and harm to a machine. It will do anything such as delete files, rewrite files, change system settings, change application settings and so on.

Spyware is a application installed on your machine without your consent that sends info to a 3rd party source. This info my be your internet browser activity, passwords, credit card numbers and any other personal info you may not want someone else getting a hold of. Spyware essentially is installed on your machine to SPY on you!

Adware often gets bundled up with spyware and called the same thing but there are big differences between the two. Adware only intent is to display popup ads or display ads in a application or open up an application to display an ad. These ads though may not be all that safe either which a lot of the time are ads to applications that are spyware themselves.

There are MANY legit applications out there that people use to clean there machine and often comes down to opinions.