One of the best ways to get adware and spyware installed on your computer — especially your new computer, your first computer — is to go web surfing with Internet Explorer.

If you properly prepare IE, you can prevent some of the problems. If you have your anti-virus program installed and running, you can prevent some problems. If you have your anti-spyware program installed, you can block some problems.

But, it’s more fun to take that new computer straight to the Internet - and you’ll quickly get nailed.

Internet Explorer 6, the web browser one that comes with Windows XP, will actually stop and warn you if a site wants to download an “Active-X control.”

This innocuous term actually means “a program that can do anything it wants to do on your computer” — and is the favorite way that adware and spyware gets installed.

One of the best ways to avoid automatically installing spyware and adware is to use a web browser other than Internet Explorer. I use Firefox for my web surfing. I only use IE to get updates to Windows from Microsoft (using Windows Updates or the improved tool Microsoft Updates).

Get Firefox

This entry was posted on Monday, October 30th, 2006 at 5:35 pm and is filed under Anti-adware, Anti-spyware, Anti-virus, Security, Web Browsing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.