where do spyware commonly stay on your computer. what locations
5 Answers
System32, and your personal directories (i.e. Documents and Settings\you\*
)
But really they can be anywhere.
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
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.
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.