Spyware Threat Opens Door to Government Involvement

Computerworld - Computer worms and viruses are the economic scourge of the age. Each time a highly destructive worm makes its way through the Web, crashing computers and destroying data, billions of dollars in damage is done.
Unfortunately, the situation is likely to get worse before it gets better. In addition to worms and viruses, a new threat has been added -- spyware. There has been conflict about how to define spyware. To many of us who fight it every day, the definition is pretty clear: Spyware is any software that is intended to aid an unauthorized person or entity in causing a computer, without the knowledge of the computer's user or owner, to divulge private information. This definition applies to spyware unleashed by legitimate businesses as much as to that from malicious code writers and hackers who are taking advantage of spyware to break into users' PCs.
Almost every PC is loaded with spyware. It's on your PC when you buy it. It enters your PC when you download free software. It makes its way onto your hard drive when you open spam e-mail.
Once in your computer, it monitors your activity. For instance, adware records the Web sites you visit and transmits that information back to advertisers, who then target you with pop-up ads. Many PC users have unwittingly loaded spyware or unknowingly had it downloaded onto their computers. This happens when a user clicks "yes" in response to a lengthy and often extremely technical or legalistic end-user licensing agreement. Or it happens when a user simply surfs the Web, where self-activating code is dropped onto their machines in what is known as a "drive-by download."
Once this software is in your hard drive, it can be exceptionally difficult to remove. Some of these pests are even designed to change themselves if someone attempts to remove them, effectively burrowing themselves deep into your computer.
The cost this inflicts on individual and corporate productivity is large and growing. Increased costs due to unnecessary consumption of bandwidth on individual PCs and the labor required for rebuilding systems to ensure that they're no longer corrupt is virtually unquantifiable. But it's huge. System degradation is time-consuming for the individual PC user and even more so for network administrators managing corporate networks.
Add theft of critical data and financial information plus litigation costs to the mix, and you have a multibillion-dollar problem. A company opens itself to potentially ruinous litigation if it fails to take precautions to ensure the security and privacy of client or