Information is power and also money, which is why there are applications to obtain information from others, whether for police investigations, control of workers or theft of identifiers banking. Anyway, the Spyware not only does it take away resources from our PC without us knowing, but it also threatens our individual freedom.
In fact, the vast majority of free programs we use today they are responsible for monitoring our activity with our PC for statistics and as information for various market studies. Thus, browsers take information about the places we visit, Steam and Epic Store collect data about what we play at any time and even Windows itself collects information in order to improve the functioning of the operating system. So technically they can be considered spyware, but they don’t rise to the level of dangerous applications, unless it’s clear that you live in the middle of a dictatorship, then they become services of secret surveillance.
What types of spyware are there?
However, despite the fact that many of us live in countries where there is democracy and with it freedom of ideas and expression, in recent years totalitarian tools have been developed in work environments to control employees. Among them are:
- Those that record user keystrokesand can therefore steal passwords.
- The ace who takes screenshotseither in video or in image.
- And they even record what our webcam is doing. All this without the knowledge of the people under surveillance.
Although here we are not going to go into the policies of some companies to catch and control their employees. We do not ignore them, but neither is it our duty, but we are going to tell you how you can check if you have one or more of these applications installed on your PC.
How do they affect PC performance?
Obviously, like all programs, they are going to spend resources on your computer and these are totally finite, although many of them are subtle enough to know how to hide from scrutiny through the task manager, from others, on the other hand, hide under service names the system key. The best solution? Having an application against malicious programs, which is paradoxical, since these are also spyware and will have to be kept up to date.
However, we can detect them manually with a bit of skill and send them to oblivion without having to rely on an application to monitor them.
How can I make sure there is no spyware on my PC?
Now we have to get to the heart of the matter, that’s why we are going to give you some tips to detect that no spyware is running on your PC.
Through MSCONFIG
- Type MSCONFIG in the taskbar search box, the “System Configuration” application should appear there, type it.
- In the services tab, you will be able to see the list of those that are running at all times, if there is one that looks suspicious to you, just uncheck it and it will stop working.
- Pay special attention to the column that says Manufacturer, as this ensures the service is certified. By the way, we recommend checking the box Hide all Microsoft services to remove from view those that come from Windows itself and, therefore, are essential to the system.
Via the command line
This method is similar to the previous one, just access the command line by pressing the Windows + X keys and select PowerShell (administrator) and write the following command: tasklist /fi “STATUS eq RUNNING
- Remember that Spyware is not a system service, so it won’t hide as such. However, it can be chosen as Universal App, in this case the command is: tasklist /apps /fi “STATUS eq RUNNING”
- In case you want to kill a program, it’s as simple as typing on the command line: taskkill /f /im executable program on the list. For example, if the program appears as spyware.exe in the image name column, you would write: taskkill /f /im spyware.exe always respecting upper and lower case.
They may be hidden in the Windows temporary folder.
Spyware often comes in the form of web applications, which can leave a flaw in the Windows temporary files folder. that you will find in C:TEMP WINDOWS. Since the stored files are temporary information that has been left behind and is not needed, we recommend that you regularly clean this folder.
We also recommend using ccleaner to periodically clean up temporary browser files on your PC and leave it cleaner than a whistle when it comes to software. Since from time to time other spyware will be loaded as a web application in the browser.
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