Carl runs a site devoted to helping you rid your computer from all sorts of spyware and malware at http://www.spyzooka.com/
I have a tale to share. This is the tale of how I got infected with the enConfidence adware. I saw a free program that I thought would be great, My Daily Horoscope, and paid dearly for it.
After I downloaded and installed My Daily Horoscope I found the Begin2Search toolbar was also installed at the same time. Almost immediately I started getting flooded with advertisements. Most of these came in the form of pop-ups, but some were in the form of floating images over my windows. The advertisements themselves were an annoyance, but then my computer started acting sluggish and my Internet speed slowed to a crawl. I did some research and found out this is because of the pop-ups being generated by enConfidence. The advertisements were hogging my processor and my bandwidth.
In my research I found some other things about enConfidence that alarmed me. Seems the program tracks your web activity and uses a unique identifier for each person, which could allow it to track your personal information. I also learned what exactly adware is. Adware is a program written with the express purpose of sending you advertisements. These advertisements usually take the form of pop-ups, but, as noted, can take other forms as well. Adware is considered an infection and the way adware spreads is by being bundled with other "free" programs. Examples of the kind of programs that come bundled with adware are screen savers, games, weather watchers, alarms, etc. I also found out that many adware programs will track your web browsing activities in order to tailor the advertisements to things that may interest you more and thus stand a better chance at selling you something.
Well, after discovering all that I want enConfidence off my computer. So I go to add/remove programs and uninstall it. I thought it was gone until the next time I started up my computer and the pop-ups were back. So I did some more research looking for how to remove enConfidence. I found that I needed to get an anti-spyware program. I also found that most anti-spyware programs only remove 80-90% of any infection, so you have to really look to find the anti-spyware that removes 100%.
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