Shel Belinkoff mused: > > Good advice, and good pointers. > > It might be a good time to mention that some adware and spy programs come > attached to useful programs that one may DL from the net, and that removing > the adware or spyware may cause the main program to stop running. > > Shel
Running anything that you've downloaded from the internet is risky (and that's a charitable description). If you don't know where it came from, you're putting the security of your system on the line by running it. It's pretty difficult for an outside source to attack a machine sitting behind a firewall, NAT router, or other such protection. But if you can somehow be persuaded to run something on your system that opens up a gateway through the firewall from inside you've let a Trojan Horse through the gates of your citadel. I've yet to see something that is useful enough for me to take that kind of risk. Even things which "only" put up ads are dangerous - it's easier to compromise an existing channel than it is to create a new one.
