Differences between a spyware scanner and a virus scanner

Spyware, adware, viruses, worms, scumware, trojans, malware... With thousands of threats piling up on the internet it is easy to become overwhelmed by the sheer volume of potential dangers (To not make matters too complex we will simply call all these things 'threats'). So a little protection is in order. Even if we don't have all that much to protect if nothing else installing a few protection tools will keep our computers running longer (and faster) and probably save us a few hours of agitation in the long run.

In order to establish some form of defense to protect us from sending our PC to the virtual graveyard we will consider the following two types of protection tools available to us (not to worry, I won't be too technical about it):

Passive defense
Active defense

Passive defense

Passive defense can basically be anything that we do to prevent things from getting into our PC. The most drastic example of a passive defense would be to turn your computer off or disconnect it from the Internet. Radical surgery indeed! Unless internet threats all of a sudden become airborne this would be beyond a shadow of a doubt the best methods of keeping our computers safe.
Since however most of us have grown quite accustomed to using the internet with the cable plugged in (grin) and our computer turned on we are forced to consider alternatives like hardware or software firewalls.

Hardware and software firewalls are basic means to prevent viruses or other malicious software from entering your PC without your consent. Firewalls can be considered passive simply because they will not actively seek out and destroy potential threats to your computer. In fact a firewall will simply ask you whether you want to allow a specific piece of information to enter your computer or not thereby leaving the entire decision making process up to you.

Active defense

An active defense would be something that actively seeks out potential problems on your computer and then immediately takes action to contain or remove the threat. A good example for an active defense would be an anti-virus scanner which generally runs in the background (while you are working on other things) and deals with threats the second they are identified. If you had just been browsing through your email looking at various attachments then your virus scanner may pop up and tell you it just found a virus in the attachment you just opened. A good virus scanner will immediately take action or give you a set of options of what to do with the threat (generally deletion will work just fine).

Having done a little research we will quickly find out that a firewall is easily found, installed and configured within a few short minutes. So now the question arises: Which one do we need and what actually is the difference between the two?

Virus scanners do just that, they look for viruses, worms and trojans which are all almost invisible threats that can spread from computer to computer and can do any number of things to your PC. These types of threats behave much like regular viruses and like regular viruses generally have a certain amount of symptoms. A virus or worm can do practically anything from just replicating (which usually causes your PC to slow down and eventually crash) to actually destroying specific files. A virus scanner will actively seek out these little monsters and put a stop to them before they can chew up your files.

Spyware scanners on the other hand look for things like adware, spyware and scumware. None of these are intended to do any direct harm to your system making them undetectable by any virus scanner (which just sees them as regular programs). However these programs are used by other people to spy on any and all of your online activities. Spyware will sit around in your computer disguised as regular programs and log all your passwords and personal information and send them back to their owner. Adware will actively supply you with adds (you generally don't want) that reflect your browsing habits (for example if you visit a lot of sites about cars you may all of a sudden find yourself attacked on a regular basis by ads about buying cars). Scumware is mainly focuses on stealing revenue away from other sites by redirecting their ads through their own system to gain the income of your activities.

Since virus scanners do not see any form of spyware or adware and spyware scanners can not detect viruses a computer user concerned for his/her information will need to install both.

This means that to gain optimal protection for our PCs we will need a firewall, a virus scanner and a spyware scanner and until someone finally combines the three we will have to carefully look for the right scanners and firewalls to suit our needs. But that's a story for another time. (grin)