The Battle Against Malware
Prevention Is The Only Solution!
What is Malware?
Malware are programs that are designed to covertly sneak onto your computer and preform malicious actions. There are three main types of malware which will be discussed here they are viruses, scareware, and spyware. Using the programs listed throughout this page may save you a lot of wasted time, hassle, data loss by preventing these programs from ever reaching your computer.
What is a Virus?
A virus is a computer program that was designed to harm a computer.
What does it do?
Viruses can do many things. They can exploit weaknesses in your network security and from there a virus can attach itself to any computer that is connected to your network. Viruses can also attempt to act like they're a harmless program secretly hiding their malicious functions. Having these programs on your computer without having antivirus protection to chase them off your hard drive will result in your computer becoming slower and possibly resulting in information corruption.
What to do about it?
Viruses are still rampant even though we don't hear about them as much. Make sure to have some level of antivirus installed. The technicians at User Friendly recommend AVG below is a link to their website where you can purchase a 1 year subscription for $54.99. Also, having this software installed doesn't do much if it isn't updated, so make sure to check your definitions every couple of weeks to make sure you are up to date. www.AVG.com
What is scareware?
Scareware is a FAKE spyware or virus removal tool.
What does it do?
Scareware will bring up a window that looks similar to a real antivirus program, it pretends to scan your system and find all sorts of viruses. When the scan is complete if you attempt to remove the viruses the program responds by informing you it cannot remove the viruses until you pay for their services. This is a scam resulting in a loss of money and the program provides no form of protection from viruses or spyware.
What to do about it?
Using the tools found on this page can help not only remove scareware, spyware, and viruses, but they can also prevent them from getting on your system in the first place. These tools act as a buffer between you and the harmful programs attempting to attack your computer.
What is spyware?
Spyware is software that is downloaded on to your PC which contacts a main server with your browsing habits, general information, etc...
What does it do?
Spyware can do many things. One of the main symptoms is a large amount of popup ads when browsing the internet. This is caused by the software monitoring your activities and placing ads where it thinks you might be swayed to purchase something. This software uploads pertinent information about you to keep track of what you do online. Other symptoms include lockups, slowness, and crashing.
What to do about it?
While it's difficult to stop the software from getting on your PC, there are some simple ways to clear these items off. There are many programs out there that eliminate these items from your hard drive. The technicians at User Friendly use Ad-Aware, Spy Bot Search and Destroy, and CCleaner all of which can be downloaded for free at www.FileHippo.com. Running these programs weekly/bi-weekly will keep your system free of unwanted spyware. Also, having this software installed doesn't do much if it isn't updated, so make sure to check your definitions every couple of weeks to make sure you are up to date. If you are online quite a bit, Microsoft Defender is also a good way to do full real time scanning to make sure the system stays clean.
What can all these programs do for you?
All of these programs can work together to attempt to stop incoming maleware. Even the the most well protected user may still get some malware on their computer. New malware is created every day, these programs however are not updated daily and when the malware becomes an issue is when it prevents your antimalware programs from updating. If there is malware giving you an issue and you cannot update even in safe mode with networking it may be time to call us at User Friendly.
Tuesday, February 15, 2011