Spyware is basically a type of program that gathers information about you without your knowledge. Spyware are programs, cookies, or registry entries that track your activity and send that data off to someone who collects this data for their own purposes.
Most often this information is a record of your ongoing browsing habits, downloads, or it could be more personal data like your name and address. Simply speaking, spyware consists of hidden applications running on your computer.
You might have unknowingly installed them when you downloaded applications from the Internet or installed software from disks. Spyware is a malicious piece of code that attaches itself to your operating system, modifies operating system files or/and otherwise runs stand alone and does nasty things to your computer.
For some reason, it's not illegal, and it's not a virus. Viruses do more damage then spyware but spyware can be just as bad. In fact, virus scanners are starting to also detect spyware and help remove it.
Spyware is different from a worm or virus because it does not destroy data on your system. Many popular file-sharing programs come bundled with spyware.Many peer-to-peer networking software packages such as Kazaa, Morpheus, and Limewire are notorious for having spyware bundled with them. Once a hacker has access to your machine, they can use it to attack other machines on the network.
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