what are the Impact of Spyware?

Spyware can cause people to lose trust in the reliability of online business transactions. Similar to the problem of counterfeit currency in the physical world, spyware undermines confidence in online economic activity. Consumers’ willingness to participate in online monetary transactions decreases for fear of personal financial loss. Vendors lose confidence that the person making the purchase is who they say they are and not actually a criminal using a stolen identity or illicit funds. In efforts to manage the risk, vendors and financial institutions often implement additional verification and other loss prevention programs at increased operational cost.

Even when financial organizations cover an individual’s loss from online fraud, these costs plus the overhead required to administer loss prevention programs are eventually passed back to consumers in the form of higher service fees, interest rates, or other price increases on the goods and services consumed. As a result, growth rates in commerce are slowed, costs increase, and demand shrinks.

Impact to Computers By monitoring and reporting user activity, spyware consumes system resources as well as network bandwidth. Depending on the number of spyware components loaded on a system and their functionality, users may experience significant performance degradation.Because spyware is not always carefully written and tested, systems infected by it are often found to have reliability problems. Affected applications may crash more frequently or the entire system may become unstable, resulting in potential productivity and data loss.Often, spyware is difficult to remove without detailed knowledge of how it works or by taking drastic measures such as wiping the system clean and starting over.In many cases, verifying the integrity of the system requires the operating system, patches, and applications to be reinstalled. These difficulties, combined with the efforts necessary to recover user data, can take a lot of time.

Risk of Future Security Incidents The sensitive information collected by spyware often includes authentication credentials that may be used for future access to the infected system. People often use the same username and password for many different systems, so these stolen credentials may be used to access other systems not yet infected. Once access is gained, additional information theft or malware installation can take place.Another way spyware puts systems at future risk is by installing backdoor access mechanisms.These backdoors give the malware operator access to control the system or to command the system to download and run arbitrary applications. Attackers can build vast collections of compromised systems without originally compromising a single system.