Caught A Virus?
If you've let your guard down--or even if you haven't--it can be hard to tell if your PC is infected. Here's what to do if you suspect the worst.
Heard this one before? You must run antivirus software and keep it up to date or else your PC will get infected, you'll lose all your data, and you'll incur the wrath of every e-mail buddy you unknowingly infect because of your carelessness.
You know they're right. Yet for one reason or another, you're not running antivirus software, or you are but it's not up to date. Maybe you turned off your virus scanner because it conflicted with another program. Maybe you got tired of upgrading after you bought Norton Antivirus 2001, 2002, and 2003. Or maybe your annual subscription of virus definitions recently expired, and you've put off renewing.
It happens. It's nothing to be ashamed of. But chances are, either you're infected right now, as we speak, or you will be very soon.
For a few days in late January, the Netsky.p worm was infecting about 2,500 PCs a day. Meanwhile the MySQL bot infected approximately 100 systems a minute (albeit not necessarily desktop PCs). As David Perry, global director of education for security software provider Trend Micro, puts it, "an unprotected [Windows] computer will become owned by a bot within 14 minutes."
Today's viruses, worms, and so-called bots--which turn your PC into a zombie that does the hacker's bidding (such as mass-mailing spam)--aren't going to announce their presence. Real viruses aren't like the ones in Hollywood movies that melt down whole networks in seconds and destroy alien spacecraft. They operate in the background, quietly altering data, stealing private operations, or using your PC for their own illegal ends. This makes them hard to spot if you're not well protected.
Is Your PC "Owned?"
I should start by saying that not every system oddity is due to a virus, worm, or bot. Is your system slowing down? Is your hard drive filling up rapidly? Are programs crashing without warning? These symptoms are more likely caused by Windows, or badly written legitimate programs, rather than malware. After all, people who write malware want to hide their program's presence. People who write commercial software put icons all over your desktop. Who's going to work harder to go unnoticed?
Other indicators that may, in fact, indicate that there's nothing that you need to worry about, include:
Imagine this; you are sitting at your desk looking at a bunch of pictures. Just a normal scene, what could go wrong? Suddenly, you’re attacked by deadly things that are trying to steal your personal information like your credit card numbers, email address, all your passwords, everything. Could this be the work of ninjas? No (bet that is what you first thought though). What about the FBI? No. Then what was it? It was a virus. If you hadn’t figured it out by now, you were looking at pictures online using Google images (for all you Bing fans, I’m sorry but Google is much better). You were downloading pictures from Google and one of them happened to contain a virus and it was downloaded with one of the pictures. How do I know this is a virus? The answer is that I don’t. I didn’t give enough symptoms to diagnose this. To the pros at hacking and security, you may know that viruses are not the only threat. If you are new to the world of computers, you might not. The three types of malware that will try to harm your PC or your data in any way are Trojans, worms, and the most famous, viruses. These three are very different and all are terrible for you and your PC.
Treat any emails with respect & confidentiality i.e. do not share with anyone that should. Never walk away from your computer so that someone else can read your emails or even worse be in a position where someone could send an email on your behalf.
The malicious software can lock the data in a way that is not difficult for an expert to reverse (Ali 89). Nevertheless, there is a more advanced method that involves the use of cryptoviral extortion to encrypt data and demand a ransom to decrypt the data. In such case, it is difficult for experts to recover files without a decryption key (Ali 89). Ransomware attacks are normally executed using a Trojan or a file that is disguised as an email attachment that seems legitimate to the user. In the last five years, ransomware attackers were able to target multiple computers through the use of a botnet (Ali 88). A botnet enables cyber criminals to attack an entire system by compromising the network. The ability to kidnap multiple systems makes ransomware a significant cyber security threat. The cybercriminals demand ransom in the form digital currencies such as bitcoins and ukash because they are difficult to
The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that cybercrime costs the global economy over $400 billion per year, and that in 2013 over 3,000 companies in the United States had their systems fall victim to cybercrime (Cyber Risks, 2015, para. 3). One of the reasons that cybercrime is so prevalent is the lack of education and prevention by businesses and individuals. One of the biggest ways to prevent cybercrime is to keep your computer and other devices current with the latest patches and updates. This keeps attackers from exploiting flaws in software. Firewalls and virus protection software are some of the most common ways people and companies protect their computers and are usually the first line of defense against outside attackers going through the data coming in while accessing the internet (Norton, 2017, para. 5). These firewalls and antivirus software would be what protect businesses and people from computer as a target cybercrimes. Another good thing that can help is to have backups of original files and maintain them usually on removable storage devices that can be secured away. When it comes to protecting from scams, frauds, and other computer as tool offenses it is important for users to be cautious when online as simple as that may seem. A lot of scammers will use pop up warning or ads. A website
At the Aim Higher College there have been recently discovered malware on the campus systems that are due to many recent attacks. I used an Anti-virus protection software called AVG on the computer systems on campus and ran a whole computer scan. The results came back very quick of numbers of malware being high and medium priorities that these should not be taken lightly. Furthermore, the scan found many viruses, Trojans, and malicious software and applications.
I decided to read the book by David Harley called Viruses Revealed. This book goes into great detail about the different kinds of viruses and virus mechanisms, the solutions to these viruses, studies on different cases of viruses and then the social aspects of viruses. In the first part of the book, Harley talks about the problems with viruses. A virus is a program that infects other programs to modify them. “Infecting means that a virus will insert itself into the chain of command” (Harley). The virus structure was defined into three different parts: Infection, Payload, and Trigger. The infection is defined as the way or ways in which the virus spreads. The payload is defined as what the virus does besides duplicating itself. Trigger is defined as the procedure that decides whether or not the payload is necessary. Harley also talks about the difference between damage versus infection. The major difference between the two is that many users have infected documents or applications on their computer. Whether or not those applications are run is the difference between the two. In part one Harley also converses about Trojan Horses. Trojan horses are normally known as a virus, but he shoots that down. Harley says that Trojan Horses are normally not viruses, but just a worm that goes from computer to computer. After talking about different kinds of viruses and worms, he goes into Anti-Virus softwares. There are two different kinds of anti-viruses. One being virus-specific. Virus-specific means that every time a virus is found on your computer, it is identified but not detected. Generic scanners do the opposite. Generic scanners detect viruses but do not identify them.
Having first appeared in Russia in 2005, referred as Winlock, that successfully scammed over £10m from unsuspecting victims before the Russian authorities arrested 10 individuals for involvement in such hackings in 2010, however it hasn’t stop the growing number of the problem. With such profitable money to obtain, perpetrators have discovered new ways to spread the malware and to cash-in at the expense of victims.
Imagine starting up your computer only to see the image on the screen melt while eerie music plays. The hard drive crunches away. What is it doing in there? Before you turn off the machine, most of your files have been deleted. Your computer is the victim of a computer virus. But where did the virus come from? It may have been that game you borrowed or, more likely, it came from an electronic document.
The protection of your network requires a level of network security. If you do not have security on your network, then you are capable of being hacked or receiving malware, spy, virus, and lots more. There are many programs or applications that can help detect and prevent strange activities on your computer, but there is also ways that you can help prevent anything from happening. Creating a password for your network is a good start toward protection of your computer. Try to make the password something only you would know, and maybe throw some numbers in there as well to maximize protection. It is good to know who all is on your network and internet; because if someone were to log on to your internet from a distance, they could plant viruses and other things into your files on the network. Quite a bit of problems occur in network when file sharing takes place in a work place to copy or manage files. Most of the time when this happens, no one sets the security setting up themselves,...
To get through these security walls “cybercrooks” are creating more and more different types of malware. What is malware? Microsoft defines it as the following “Malware is sho...
In simple terms a virus can be defined as software, which is unwanted and executes arbitrary code on systems. It acts as a small software program, which has the capability of exploiting other software programs in order to piggyback[1]. The terms viruses and malwares are used interchangeably, however, in technical terms, the viruses are a subset of malware and so are trojans, worms and rootkits.
In this globalized arena, with the proliferating computer users as well as computer networks, risks associated like Malware attacks are also multiplying. As the proverb
One type of threat people have to deal with is the annoying malevolent code, better known to most of us as malware and spyware. This type of threat goes through the security system of the individual when that person accesses a website or opens an email that is infected. Malware and spyware are capable of finding ways to get into your computer by loopholes and cement themselves in your system which allows them to copy personal information and worm their way into other computers by emails that you send. These threats can be quite sneaky as they say they will do one thing but instead do a totally opposite thing and in return infects the computer without your knowledge. Malevolent codes can also classified as viruses and worms which are just as capable of producing more harm to you and your computer.
There are many instances where hacking is used for crime by the “Black Hats,’ among these instances a lot are viruses, which have bine know to wreak major havoc upon the internet. One of the worst was the “Melis...