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you find via search engines may be there purely to send you viruses or spyware in as attractive package as possible. It is up to you to decide if the webpage you are considering going to offers sufficient return to merit the risk.

Hackers and hacking programs try to access your computer from the outside and take it over for their own nefarious purposes. This may not even be obvious to you as they could use only a limited amount of your computer's resources in the background while you continue working in the fore or set it up to run their requests when the computer is idle so that you wouldn't even notice a slower response time when you are using it. I heard a few years ago that there was an estimate that a third of all personal computers in the USA were being used in this manner by Organised Crime. Once your computer has been hacked, they can leave a "backdoor" or trojan program to grant them repeat access.

Considering the number of computers connected to the Internet these days, the risk of a private personal computer being hacked is very slight. However gaining access to your computer through a trojan is more common, it can enter your computer by tagging on to your normal Internet activity. Once there, it sets up a backdoor and sends a message back to its originating computer identifying your computer so it can be used as described above. To protect your computer from either of these situations you need a good two-way firewall; two-way in that it blocks inbound unauthorised access and also outbound information from a trojan. Sunbelt and Sygate provide free versions of their personal firewall products that are very good; Sunbelt Personal Firewall used to be called Kerio Personal Firewall. Most good anti-virus applications will include known trojans in their virus definition files, so this might trap the trojan when it first arrives on your computer. But trojans by their nature are far more discreet than viruses and therefore may not become known for some time.

Spyware is what the name implies, programs that insinuate their way onto your computer for the express purpose of spying on you in some manner. "Tracking cookies" are a particularly common variety. They are intrusive but usually harmless, but they report back, usually if you revisit the website they originated from. I recommend using Spybot S&D, followed by AdAware on a weekly basis after updating them, both are available free for personal use.

Another, much nastier, type of spyware is a keylogger,

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