The IT industry isn’t as boring and technically obsessed as many outsiders believe. Viruses and malicious hacker threats in particular have been increasingly sensationalised in the popular press, squeezing the issues gradually into the public consciousness.

Causing a big stir is the prevalence of Adware and Spyware which steal processing power and track users’ footprints around the Internet. This group of ‘Grayware’ applications has plagued home and SME users, and is now becoming an extremely serious matter for enterprises too - turning more invasive and sinister by the day.

I recently described to a friend what a Worm Program was and how it worked; lying undetected on a PC until a pre-set sequence brings it to the surface to perform some malicious action before disappearing again. Her smile of intrigue turned into a gaping maw as I explained how together, tens of thousands of these programs activating simultaneously create a virtual machine out of the control of its users. “Just like in The Terminator…” she mumbled in response, rapidly growing pale.

Security is the one aspect of IT that regularly grips imaginations, which is great news if you’re trying to impress at a dinner party and even better news if you’re trying to wrestle greater resources and acceptance from senior non-IT colleagues. IT used to be a black art that ‘ people over there’ dealt with. Now it’s at the boardroom level and everyone and their dog has an interest in how company data is being protected.


You could well argue that Grayware - the collective term for the family of Adware, Spyware, Diallers, Hijackers, Key-Loggers and other ‘Ghost’ Programs that are perpetually installing themselves onto every PC on the planet – is the new Spam. Like Spam, Grayware been around for a while and in many forms it’s pretty harmless stuff that irritates more than infiltrates. Also like Spam however, it’s reached a fit of pique – we’ve all got it, it’s causing some extremely troubling effects, and it’s time enterprises took it more seriously.

Many of the most threatening impacts of Grayware, such as usage pattern tracking, invasion of privacy and information theft can remain unseen and are all possible without the user having to consciously open, download or execute any applications. Just visiting a web site harbouring this technology is enough to become a victim.

Unwitting use of Grayware can compromise valuable information such as credit card numbers, passwords, and even a user's identity. Other than the generally familiar Adware and Spyware, here are some other examples of Grayware threats in the wild:

Key Loggers - perhaps one of the most dangerous Grayware applications, installed to capture the strokes made on a keyboard. These applications can be designed to capture user and password information, credit card numbers, email, chat, instant messages, and more.