Spyware is not as serious as viruses or worms that can actually damage your system, and that spread themselves by sending email messages to people you know without your knowledge and with attachments which will infest their computers if they click on them, so you still need a good virus protection program, and you need to be sure it frequently downloads information on new viruses.

Spyware is also not as serious as trojans which might be installed by a hacker entering systems without a firewall, and which may then be used either to attack the computer they are installed on, or which might be used in Denial of Service Attacks against important servers on the internet.

So I definitely encourage everyone to have a good virus protection program like Norton, McAfee, F-Secure, or Panda, and a good firewall program, like ZoneAlarm, Black Ice, Norton, or McAfee, and you should definitely make sure to keep these programs, and particularly the virus definitions up to date, but for a complete security system for your computer you might want to include Ad-aware.

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