Spyware Search and Destroy

Posts Tagged ‘Viruses’

Do the Media Spread Computer Viruses?

Could the mass media hype about computer viruses actually make the problem worse?

If you believe what you hear in the media, there are an awful lot of viruses going around. No, I’m not talking about the make-you-sick kind of virus, though they get plenty of airtime, too. I’m talking about the kind of virus that enters via your internet connection rather than your nasal passages.

What the mainstream media often don’t tell you–at least, in most radio and television newscasts and in the crucial headlines and opening paragraphs of newspaper articles– is that many of these “viruses” are not viruses at all.

What Computer Viruses Really Are

The main reason the mainstream media always are in alarm over viruses is that they tend to call any malicious computer program a virus. In reality, there are at least eleven distinct types of malicious software, or malware, commonly affecting computers today. The most common of these are worms, Trojans, and spyware.

So, what’s the difference between computer viruses and the other types of malware? The difference is that computer viruses are just about the only ones that regularly shut down computers and cause other obvious damage. The most common of the other kinds of malware–worms, Trojans, and spyware–are usually only detectable with a special scan.

The Real Danger of Computer Viruses

If the other types of malware are so unobtrusive that they can only be detected with a special scan, then what’s to worry about? For starters, these programs are called malicious for a reason: they are designed to cause some kind of damage, if not to your computer, then to someone else’s.

Worms are most famously used to damage, destroy, or disrupt other computer networks than the one on which the host computer is located. For instance, worms have been used by website owners to shut down rival websites by sending overwhelming numbers of requests to the computer that hosts that website. Worms have also been used to send out viruses to other computers, often without infecting the host machine–after all, what would it benefit the worm to shut down its host computer?

Trojans, in turn, are often used to insert worms and other malware on your computer, even if the Trojan itself does no damage.

But even if you don’t care what happens to anyone else, you should still be concerned about one kind of malware: spyware, a kind of malware that, true to its name, collects data from your computer and sends it back to a remote host.

Most spyware is only interested in monitoring your internet usage so it can tell other programs, called adware, what advertising to popup on your computer. However, there are criminal spyware programs that steal financial data, or perform a thorough identity theft. Don’t think you have personal or financial data on your computer? Some spyware programs contain a key logger, which is a program that copies whatever you type, usually in order to snatch passwords. Even if you keep no financial information on your computer, if you ever buy anything over the web, the key logger would allow its owner to buy stuff using the same information you typed in to buy stuff yourself.

Why Blame the Media?

Given the danger of all these different types of malware, isn’t it a good thing that the mass media are becoming hysterical about it? And can’t they be forgiven the sloppy reporting of calling Trojans, worms, spyware, and other malware “viruses”?

No, no, no.

This is a classic case of bad reporting doing more damage than no reporting at all. In this case, the damage bad reporting has done is to promote a common myth that goes something like this: “The only malicious software is a virus. Viruses damage your computer. Therefore, if my computer is working OK, my computer has no malicious software. I only need to scan my computer for problems when there is a sign of problems.”

Thanks to this myth, many people complacently let their antivirus software go months out of date, not wanting to be bothered with scheduling an automatic update. Just as bad, many people don’t have any extra software to combat the other types of malware that may not be covered by antivirus software.

In fact, it’s not uncommon for people who have found malware on their computers after a scan to say, “But I never had malware on my computer before!” But how would they have known if they had never scanned!

Until the biggest mainstream media–and especially television–start educating the public about the need to have their computers automatically scanned at least daily, the world will continue to have major, drawn-out problems with malware that could have been wiped out as soon as soon as the anti-malware software makers discovered it.

And until that day, the mainstream media will have many more opportunities to run hysterical stories about “viruses,” thereby forcing them to sell more newspapers and broadcast to even larger audiences of people who suck at the information trough yet somehow never become full.

Computer Viruses, How to Detect, Remove and Prevent Them

Today I want to talk a little about the dreaded computer virus. The goal of this article is to teach you, the home user, the fundamental skills needed to help detect, remove, and most importantly prevent viruses from infecting your computer. As the owner of a computer consulting business, I have seen 1st hand how much damage computer viruses can do. To help protect yourself from a virus attack, it will be necessary to understand exactly what a virus is. A virus is essentially a software program designed with malicious intentions, to copy itself and spread from one computer to another. What makes a virus so dangerous is what they are designed to do.

A virus, once installed on your computer, can easily corrupt or delete data from your computer. This can be anything from your latest Word document to the irreplaceable pictures of your loved ones. We will get into exactly what a virus can do later in this article. Now that you have an idea of what a virus is and what it can do to your computer, lets discuss how your computer gets infected. I have heard countless times from people, ” But I did not open any email attachments, how can I be infected?” While it is true that a majority of viruses are hidden within email attachments, they can also be downloaded into our computers in the form of images, videos, or even instant messages. I have personally removed a virus from Cd’s, jump drives, and floppy disks.

Lets talk about ways to help protect your computer from viruses. To protect your computer from these threats it is vital that you have an anti virus program installed and up to date. I have seen many times in the field computers that have anti virus programs but still are infected with a virus. Let me point out that not all anti virus programs are equal. I will not discuss in this article which anti virus program you should or should not use however email me and I will be happy to help you in that aspect. Your anti virus program will do you little good if you do not keep your definitions up to date. New virus are being identified all the time so it is vital to keep your anti virus program up to date on the latest threats. Another proven method is to use a firewall.

A firewall is essentially software or hardware that is designed to filter out information that is being sent to or from your computer. Think of a firewall as a Guard at the end of your driveway, before anyone enters your home they must first pass a set of rules or security checks you have given before they are allowed to enter your home. Some of the software-based firewalls include Norton Internet Security, Zone Alarm and Trend Micro. You may be using a hardware firewall and not even know it. If you have a LAN (Local area network) then chances are you have a router of some kind. Most routers come built in with a firewall, which is very effective at protecting your computer from viruses. Another technique used to help prevent viruses is to keep your computer up to date. If you are using a windows based PC, check Windows Update often for any security patches that are released.

Do not open email attachments if you do not know the sender, this is asking for trouble. Lets move on to identifying infected computers. As a PC technician, it is my responsibility to quickly identify the signs of virus infections. Computers with virus infections will often show some of the following symptoms. Please note, that the issues listed below may be caused by several problems, such as spyware, and are not specific to viruses. Your computer may be slow to start or shut down. You may be missing data on your hard drive or, in worst case scenarios, lose all data on the drive. You may experience strange error messages or you computer will shut down unexpectedly. Your fonts may be distorted and overlap or you may experience difficulties in printing.

These are just some examples of the harm viruses can do. Now the most difficult part, removal. This is a topic worthy of its own article as there are many different procedures in virus removal. I will discuss with you the very basics. If you think you are the victim of a virus do a thorough scan of your computer. It may also be beneficial if you scan your hard drive while in safe mode. This is usually accomplished by tapping F8 at start up, but refer to your computer’s manual for instructions to be certain.

If you do not have an anti virus program, first thing to do is get one! In the meantime you may use the services of an online virus removal tool. Many of the popular anti virus programs offer this service. My intent of this article was to help inform you of the dangers virus threats can pose, as well as giving you the knowledge to help detect, remove and prevent these threats. I hope I have accomplished this, and you can walk away after reading this article, feeling more confident of your abilities to protect your computer from virus threats.

Remove Computer Viruses Completely?Best method for Removing Virus!

Want to Remove Computer Viruses Completely? Nowadays, more and more computer users are increasingly relying on outside help to protect their computer security. It is really hard for common computer users to get rid of the network threats, such as viruses, spyware, malware and so on. How to resolve computer viruses and retain the excellent performance of our computer? This is what we are going to talk about in this article.

You may find out that when it comes to computer security, many users are in a bind and they usually ask help from friends or just type the question online and then wait someone or specialist to provide useful answer. Sometimes it works. But when we are in an urgent situation and have to remove the virus immediately, how can we wait for help?

So, we should figure out these problems by ourselves! One of the fastest and effective ways is to install professional security program. Some people may be hesitant to do this because they can not recognize the Fraud tool from the Real security tool. Admittedly, with threats cropping up at an increasing pace, we hardly know exactly which is the safe program for our PC and which is the imitated one. But all we need for our PC is just one or two programs at the most. The point is we should find the best fit one or two for our PC. It will not be very tough to choose one or two good programs for our computer, right?

For your convenience, you are recommended to use this security specialist—Spyware Cease, a professional spyware removal to help remove spyware threats/virus from your computer, and protect your PC against latest spyware at real-time. You can get more security information by clicking here!

Start your free and safe scan to get rid of computer virus completely now!

Technologic Phenomena ? Protect Your PC from Spyware and Viruses

In this era of technological phenomena it’s vital to protect your personal computer as well as confidential information.  Whether you have state of the art computer protection or simple 15 dollar virus protection software, you need to make sure you’re using something. Just like career criminals in the real world, the internet is crawling with cyber criminals, without some sort of protection you could be a victim of fraud, or even worse, identity theft. There’s a variety of protection and virus removal software available depending on your price range, user control, and also the kind of protection your pc needs.

Gary Warner, Director of Computer Forensics, University of Alabama at Birmingham (UK) said – bogus postcards circulating on the Internet to reach e-mail inboxes globally contain links that lead to the PC virus – Zeus Bot, as reported by Science Daily on July 25, 2009. He also said the phony postcards direct recipients to follow a link to view its contents, however, the moment the click button is pressed; the Zeus Bot virus unleashes itself on the users’ PCs. Thereafter when infection sets in, the malware enables cyber criminals to intercept banking passwords along with account numbers, and e-mail as well as other sensitive account details of users. Security experts cautioned that users getting e-mails which are allegedly sent to them from a bank or websites like eBay should not click on any link provided in them instead they type the URL of the website from where the message arrives into their browser’s address bar and directly access the site.

There are a variety of viruses out there, one type of virus will attempt to use the system as a platform to spread itself to other contacts on the infected computer user’s MSN contact list and saved email addresses. It can do so by sending messages to your friends and families and entice them to click on normal-looking links to malicious websites. Even files that you have downloaded and plan to forward to your peers might also get infected with the viruses. They can cause of a lot of damages to your PC if they are not removed early. Some viruses may act as a key logger, a monitoring device to record all the keystrokes that you type on your keyboard as well as destroying all the data in your hard disks. Some unfortunate users who have had their systems infected have lost there entire hard drive; passwords and credit card numbers stolen for identity theft.

The best way to protect yourself is to invest in some sort of protection software. That way even when friends and family are using your computer, you are always protected.  If you plan on using the internet a lot and download music, movies, and games, it’s not a bad idea to find a pc scan software to run a self check every few days just to be sure.  You can find a variety of spyware removal and antivirus software at www.removalantivirus.com –  Free Scans

How to Effectively Remove Computer Viruses

Sometimes, no matter how careful you are in choosing the programs and files to download, there are still some malicious wares that can get through your firewall, thus the infection on your computer’s system. More often than not, this happens if there are two or more people using the same computer. You surely cannot monitor each and every website that they visit or the files that they download. If this happens to you, it is essential that you remove computer viruses immediately. If you would not take time to get rid of Trojan virus, it can bring more harm to your system. At the same time, your security and personal information will also be at risk.

Downloading dependable anti-virus software is the best way to remove computer viruses. Once it has been completely installed, you can scan your system to check for the malicious wares that already accessed your system. In just a couple of minutes, you will see the infected programs and files before the anti-virus program will delete it for good. But installing it is not enough. You must also keep it updated as well since new malwares were created from time to time. If the anti-virus program is not up to date with the latest virus releases, there is a chance that it would not detect the malware as it scans. Therefore, the virus will still spread, risking your whole system and your security at the same time.

Although you can download free anti-spyware or anti-virus software, you can also avail of some of the most reliable programs for a small fee. This is very advisable for those who store sensitive files and information on their computer because of the higher security and added anti-virus features. In case scanning your computer won’t work, then maybe it’s time that you have your system reformatted.

Few Tips On How To Maintain Computer Security And Preventing Viruses

The first part of the process is to destroy the virus on the computer is to ensure that the virus is actually what is causing the problem on the computer. After the source of the problem has been established you will then need to conduct a few more steps in order to treat the virus that is on the computer system. There are several different methods that can be used in order to destroy the viruses that are on the computer system. These methods will all assist you to get rid of the problems that are being caused by the virus.

It is also very important to know how to get rid of the spy ware viruses that can affect the computer system.  Another style of virus that you should learn how to get rid of is the one that is known as Trojan. These methods are generally the same one however there is some differences. If you want to destroy the viruses that can affect your computer then you will need to install a software package that is designed to act against the virus. The software is often referred to as antivirus software.

You will need to visit the manufactures website that deal with virus scan software in order to install any updates. It is important to keep your antivirus software up to date, as this will enable you to keep your computer free from viruses. It is very important to check the labels on the websites for information regarding the specific virus ware that is available. This can be done by simply typing the name of the virus into a search engine such as Google and then you are browse through the information.

It is a good idea to keep in mind that simply deleting the file that contains the virus will not completely remove the virus. Removing the file only will not work because the viruses often create new files in order to make it hard to delete them.  It is very important not to send emails until a virus has been deleted, as this will simply send it from one computer to another. It is very important to make sure that you completely remove the virus from the computer. There is only really one way that you can ensure that the virus is completely removed is to boot the computer system using a clean boot up disk. This rebooting process should be followed up by running a DOS antivirus scanner. The scanner will be able to report if there are any infections.

If the computer is still infected you would then need to delete the infected files and restore them from a backup system. It is better to prevent the virus from getting onto the computer rather than have to find ways to repair the computer had removed the viruses. Prevention will mean that you do not actually have to worry about the virus in the fist place.  There are some steps that you can take in order to prevent viruses from getting onto the computer system.

Computer Viruses and Antivirus Treatment

See, once your computer gets connected with the global net it faces various threats and attacks from unfriendly microelements walking freely through the cyber space and seeking for new victims. It doesn’t help if you wash your hands before touching the keyboard; the little monsters called computer viruses could be defeated in their own methods. This is where the sword and shield aren’t able to help your romantic tendencies and the only way to eliminate this gross injustice is to accept a battle with electronic weapons!

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While computer viruses behave pretty much like biological ones, they need special treatment that admits no analogy in biological terms. As insidious as their biological correspondents, they infect every living cell and spread around in record time. Thus, if you really need a functional pc, you should procure some electronic pills to get your work safe.

In this case you cannot become a faithful guardian to your machine until you have installed an antivirus program skilled enough to detect viruses, worms and Trojan horses – all “trustful” members of a happy family! It is important to keep clear about the differences between these sorts of malware, in order to protect your computer from them all. Viruses, as we used to know them when first dealing with a computer are no more that widely spread since the Internet became popular. Once again: you need an antivirus that helps against viruses, worms and Trojan horses (not only viruses)!

See the slight differences in methods and effects:
Viruses intend to destroy your data. They act in sly movements and this is how the predominant negative effect of viruses is their uncontrolled self-reproduction, which wastes or overwhelms computer resources, until your cyber work space doesn’t leave you room for your actions.

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But since we’ve got Internet connection we have to deal with the most popular visitors from “out there”! Introduce yourself to malicious worms: worm uses a network to send copies of itself to other systems and it does so without any intervention, thus, you stay helpless face to face with it. In general, worms harm the network and consume bandwidth, whereas viruses infect or corrupt files on a targeted computer. Viruses generally do not affect network performance, as their malicious activities are mostly confined within the target computer itself.

And here is the moment when the masquerade starts: Trojan horse is a malicious program that is disguised as legitimate software. Trojans use false and fake names to trick users into dismissing the processes. In most cases the program performs other, undesired functions, but not always. The useful, or seemingly useful, functions serve as camouflage for these undesired functions.

While some of them are particularly benign or simply annoying, others are extremely harmful and deadly dangerous. In analogy, just compare a regular cold with pneumonia… no need to mourn for you computer! What it really needs is an anti-virus protection. Remember, they are active in this certain moment, when you’re peacefully typing. Hurry up to get protected and try out PC Tools AntiVirus 2.0 as a fair suggestion.

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