Spyware
The latest computer security issue to confront computer users is spyware. This is software that gets installed on your computer that can do a variety of sneaky tasks that you know nothing about, including tracking the websites you visit, putting pop-up advertisements on your screen, reading email addresses from your files and sending them to spammers, or even recording everything you type (including all your passwords) and mailing them off to people of ill repute.
This has become a particular high-profile issue in business, because many users have unknowingly installed spyware on their work computers. There are many free program downloads (like the Kazaa file-sharing program) that actually do two functions - one that you know of, and then spyware working quietly in the background.
This would be a particularly nasty situation in a school. If a teacher’s computer is compromised with spyware, someone somewhere can get the teacher’s passwords for email, student records, and file server access. This actually happened a few years ago in one of our districts, and had some very messy results.
One of the first steps is to stop letting students or staff download freeware and installing it on their computers. I like having an animated kitty on my desktop as much as the next guy, but since I don’t know where it’s been, I won’t let it or programs like it into my computers.
There is a very informative online article about this topic at the online version of Computerworld. It’s worth checking out, and be sure to read the sidebar stories in the side section labeled “There’s more to this story.”