It all started with the Trojan virus that gave the computer another dimension of software. It was said to be developed by the Russians during the cold war to steal data from the United States of America. Basically it sends data across the network and it gets to the hands of agents and computer programmers and decodes the data to counter any military or espionage operations. These are then labeled under the umbrella of so called "digital pests".

The network now has drastically changed especially in volume and in function. The World Wide Web for instance has many functions that it could be dubbed as the virtual community of the world. These so called digital pests have also evolved in function and in tasks.

ADWARES

Practically Adwares are harmless in such a way that they are used mainly for marketing, product promotions and information dissemination. These are small program applets that are embedded inside a downloaded trial program that after using the program or while using the program there's a trigger somewhere that tells it to pop out. In this case this can only be an annoying program, but further than that its nothing else.

SPYWARES

Spywares - the Trojan virus of the new millennium. This was developed to gather more data used for market studies and demographical data. Then, it was bound to have a darker potential since the data it is getting are not just addresses, names, sex, and age, shopping preference or shopping habits. It also gets vital information such as credit card numbers and bank account numbers. People who took advantage of this software practically took your identity and max out your credit card.

MALWARE

Malware also known as malicious softwares is the classification of where modern viruses belong. This software applet replicates them or does damage to your operating system or boot sector to cripple the computer. Some of these viruses even do damage on the hardware side of things. It damages the RAM and even hard disk drives and erases all of your precious files.

Remedies for these types of attacks are in constant development. It is good to be vigilant when downloading files from the internet. Download only at sites that are trusted and certified trial hubs for the software companies. It is good to have a third party firewall and anti-virus that constantly updates its database. Carefully read the terms and conditions before you click yes or proceed since most adwares which can also be spywares at the same time have clauses for the user in the agreement of software use.