Posts
Welcome to an insidious world of Logic Bombs, Trojans, Worms, and Viruses. Just imagine: switching on you computer, sweating, only to discover to your horror - all your precious and personal data on your drive has been completely wiped.
You might even notice:
Your computer starts doing odd things by doing things it never done before
Your files start disappearing, the computer may stall, and runs slowly, or might even crash (frequently.)
Now what are you going to do?
Its a battle out there, fighting to protect your data from hard foes. Its like most of the time your online experience will go with out harm, but how do you handle them when things do go wrong? (And they will?)
This article discusses how to better deal with these malicious programs, by understanding what with these insidious things are, and provides a simple plan of attack to defeat them.
Types of Dangers
Logic Bombs
Have you ever seen those war films where the soldier steps or trips on the wire and boom he’s gone?
Thats an example of logic bomb. These bombs are usually aimed at a single victim in mind, such as a means of revenge by an employee dismissed by their employer. It’s triggered when a particular action arises in the computer like the clock reaching a certain date.
Trojan
Seen the film Troy? Then you've seen a great example of a Trojan Horse. Unable to seize the city, the Greeks supposedly gave up. In honour of the Trojans, the Greeks left a gift - a giant wooden horse. In side hid a number of warriors, and under cover of darkness, the soldiers slipped out from their hiding place and opened up the city gates to admit the rest of the army.
Hence the saying "beware of Greeks baring gifts".
The computer equivalent of a Trojan Horse is just a devious, it can appear to be one thing, say a game, but actually contains hidden, undocumented code that can often be destructive. So be careful whatever you download.
Worm's
Worm’s spread themselves through email and can read your address book and then replicate itself by making a copy of its virus code to everyone in your address book.
Virus
Everyones had a cold, someone just sneeze's then spreaded around only for others in the vicinity to catch it. That's exactly how a computer virus behaves. Acts just like bacteria doing nothing more than replicating themselves. They’ve been wrecking havoc on computers well before the internet.
A virus has usually two functions: to spread to other computers (replicate itself) by disk or as a “Macro Virus” becoming part of an e-mail attachment, using the internet to move around.
Most computer viruses do something destructive like wiping contents of a hard drive or chasing other system resources.
When on the internet you can find shareware, freeware and demo programs and although they seem like a bargain at first, and you can actually find a program useful, but beware many programs contain virus code just waiting for you to download it and execute. (Your computer that is.)
Thats what happened to my friend Rachel, looking for demo software for gardening design. She found the right software at what she thought was the right download site and in her eagerness downloaded the software, with no thought to the safety of her computer.
She just didn't set her anti-virus, to automatically scan the software for rogues elements, instead she installed the gardening program and found a virus was now infecting her computer.
Upon finding this out, Rachel was horrified!
Luckily Rachel, had antivirus software which was up-to-date, and eventually found the virus and automatically disinfected her machine. Without the anti-virus software the results might have been hasher.
The Battle Plan - How to prevent this from happening to you
Buy an up-to-date antivirus product – use them regularly and always keep their definitions up-to-date.
Treat all disks and all downloads as being potentially virus threatening.
Don’t run any programs until they have been scanned and passed as clean.
Store safely your master disks.
Don’t run any programs until they have been scanned and passed as clean.
Store safely your master disks.
Take regular backups of all your data files. Lock theses disk away – preferably from a different location to your PC.
Make sure your web browswer is the most uptodate
Never leave your PC switched on, booted up or unattended.
Also get a good Firewall!
A good Firewall acts like a gatekeeper; allowing trusted friends in and keeping out know or suspected enemies. It’s a piece of software (or hardware) that makes decisions needed to monitor the flow of data to and from the outside world.
In conclusion
There are many vendors of these type of software and it’s pointless to attempt to list them all here. When choosing, make sure the virus checker has the capability to quickly respond to new threats – is perhaps the most important issue.
When you choose your firewall, carefully review each product, remember new security holes are popping up all the time for firewall products, mostly because the firewall was configured incorrectly in the first place.
If you think you have a virus, then DON’T PANIC.
If you are in the middle of running a program, get to some point where you can exit the program gracefully.
Ensuring any data files you have opened are closed therefore minimising any potential damage.
Don’t act in haste. Power down your PC and leave it for a while, and get your (good) anti-virus scanner, make sure its up-to-date and use it.
Scan all hard drives and any CD/DVD/Floppy disks you use regularly. The anti-virus program will automatically disinfect your system when a virus is found.
By following the advise in this article you will defeat your foe 99% of time. Don't blame the technology when you encounter a computer problem. Most people through ignorance or laziness fail not to maintain a strategy for protecting their computer blame. Don't let this happen to you...Get your self a really good Virus checking program and a good Firewall. There just are no excuses.
Find out the 10 most viruses and worms and more information on computer protection providing essential virus protection against viruses, hackers and privacy threats. There's powerful and easy to use virus scanner including a built in firewall, proving you with annual protection and FREE technical support. Go for more information goto http://www.onlineresources.ws
No comments:
Post a Comment