where do spyware commonly reside

Question

where do spyware commonly stay on your computer. what locations

Answer 1

System32, and your personal directories (i.e. Documents and Settings\you\*)

But really they can be anywhere.

Answer 2

Spyware on windows has no reason to be in a specific file, apart from maybe in a directory in your path variable. Though really it wouldn't matter where it was, so it could just make a directory where ever it wanted and do what it wanted from there. I agree to use an application, since these are especially designed and usually invest a lot of money to make ways to locate them. Even if you do delete a folder it's in, it may have spawned lots of files with copies in or changed the registry which would be very difficult to manually find problems in

Answer 3

Anywhere. If they stuck to certain locations, they'd be easy to find and remove. Many even randomly generate a location on each computer - it might be C:\Windows\apweorpu.exe on one computer, and C:\Windows\System\qpoxzweor.exe on another.

Don't rely on manually hunting them down on the filesystem. Use the spyware detection apps out there - and more than one, if you can.

Answer 4

IF there were a specific location where spyware lives, anti-spyware software would easily be able to prevent and remove it. Instead, spyware tends to replace existing files at various places in the system.

Answer 5

Wherever you don't look.

(Use a system scanner, or reformat to be sure...)