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PC Tips: Threat awareness!

By Anthony Ashard

In today's fast paced computer orientated society where we rely ever more heavily on our portable laptops and smart devices, we find the ever present menace of malicious threats.

To substantiate this, anti malware scanners (SpyBot S&D) for example have more than 1.6 million signatures, increasing every day.

Infections can came come from many sources, some more common than others, however methods of infection are getting quite cunning, Each year, industry ships about 150-200 million brand new desktops, laptops and servers. Statistics from surveys have shown that the average new computer can become infected within as little as 20 minutes of it's initial connection to the internet.

Typically most infections are as a direct result of the user not having any awareness of the threat or how to take simple steps to prevent infection.

Widespread infections including fast spreading threats like the Mydoom virus managed to infect more than 1.2 million computers within 24 hours of it's launch in 2004.

An estimated £7 billion in direct damages from Spyware infections was recorded last year, this included technician costs to repair its effects, loss of productivity, and loss of company revenue from system instabilities and down-time.

One of the worst infections ever to be released was the sql.slammer worm, it was designed to look for network access on a computer taking advantage of a vulnerability in MS Windows, once it finds a computer it infects it and then starts scanning for more vulnerable networks while setting up a denial of service attack that prevented Windows updates. the worm overloaded the infected computer causing it to randomly reboot. It was reported that the 'Slammer' worm infected more than 80,000 computers worldwide within just ten minutes of it's launch, and went on to infect millions more within 24 hours.

Here's a short-list of the worlds top five Security suites:

* Comodo Internet Security 4.0.141842.828 FREE
* Online Armor Free 4.0.0.35 FREE
* Malware Defender 2.6.0
* Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 9.0.0.736
* Privatefirewall 7.0.20.36 FREE

Click here for Computer virus information and help.

Please remember this:
If your PC becomes infected, you risk infecting any network you connect to, and risk sending a virus to anyone in your contacts lists. Help to stop the spread of malicious threats.

Tips:

* Scan your PC frequently using a good scanner and updated with the latest definitions.

* Always scan with different products, one scanner alone is rarely 100% affective at threat removal.

* If your scanner has 'Heuristic' scanning make sure you set it to 'high' to detect more newer unknown threats.

* If you're not entirely sure, always set your scanner to quarantine threats upon detection.

* Steer well clear of any email attachments even if they appear to be from friends, without first confirming they were sent legitimately.

* Worms commonly infect other computers by using contacts lists, and may appear to be someone you know, be extra careful when opening this sort of email/attachment.

* Many threats come from enticing link descriptions. one such link is circulating Facebook, which is fact a very malicious damaging virus that will destroy your hard drive, and it's contents.

CLICK HERE for the latest news update from FaceBook security team.

Contributor's Note

According to the FBI statistics on cybercrime, 62% of computer users (mostly from the business community) experienced some sort of unauthorized use or intrusion of their computer systems (down from a high of 70% of users in 2008).

Of those unauthorized uses, 65% were virus attacks (a survey by Microsoft found similar, but somewhat higher, numbers of computer intrusions).

In other words, out of 1,000 computers, about 520 were subject to some sort of unauthorized use or attack.

Out of those 520 computers, 65% of them were infected by viruses. This amounts to 338 computers out of every 1,000.

Put another way, about 33.8%, or roughly a third, of all computers are victims of virus attacks each year.

PLEASE VISIT THE CONTRIBUTOR'S WEBSITE

CTEK Solutions.co.uk
Friendly PC Support 'Jaws' Compatible
www.ctek-solutions.co.uk

Excellent Anthony, especially the list of anti-virus software. Do you know anymore about the ongoing attack on Facebook i.e. has a title been associated with the rogue email?

A massive scareware scam has been targeting Facebook users over the past two days, in which a fake virus warning is distributed via e-mail and then forwarded or published to thousands of Facebook walls, according to researchers at security software vendor Panda Security.

Facebook and other social networking sites have provided a fertile field for hackers and malware purveyors to ply their trade. Not surprisingly, the level of sophistication and clever tactics used to hoodwink Internet users continues to escalate on an almost daily basis.

In a blog posting Thursday, PandaLabs researchers begrudgingly admitted that whoever conjured up this latest scareware scam was smarter and more creative than most.

The unsolicited warning delivered through e-mail accounts and then posted on Facebook asks users if their Facebook has "been running slow lately" and directs recipients to click on their Settings link and check to see if there's something called "unnamed app" in their application settings.

However a scam could potentially be a real threat in a recent reverse psychological trick played out in recent off-site reports. Who can one believe? | See the Facebook security link above for more details.

Thanks, Anthony. I myself had become one of the victims of these "people" who perpetrate this stuff-- for fun apparently.

It's quite amazing and somewhat scary to know that we invite applications into our lives offering all our profile details and content to these trusted application coders. These applications are frequently abused by hackers and malware coders.

I offer my services freely and be more than happy to assist in the safe cleaning of your computer/network.

I already had it done -- I had something like 120 or so viruses on my laptop. It's clean now. But I thank you for your kind offer.

James Emery Vigh May 19, 2010 15:51

Very informative! I had my laptop in to be cleaned not too long ago. They told me that there were some pretty sophisticated purveyors now working out of Asia. Many sites are blocking users from that area. ie www.squidoo.com

Laraine May 19, 2010 16:21

Thanks so much for caring enough about us to alert us to these threats. Well done!

Hi Larry, my whole website is dedicated to the fight against malicious threats. Please feel free to visit and join, perhaps even sign my petition that is an active support to elliminate spayware from the internet. Click here for more information.

Useful content, thanks. We can never be reminded too often about the threats against our computer security.

odls May 20, 2010 07:55

That is one reason why I stay away from places like Facebook. We all seem to have to run very fast to stay ahead of the bad guys.

Janet Jenson May 23, 2010 18:55

Hi Puniksem, I have quite recently survived an attack on my desk top computer and my web sites by a Trojan, first it hit my desk top then it hit my sites I cleared it but because I knew nothing about this stuff it took me a week. Then the very next week I was hit again with the same kind of trojan two days after getting back to normal, second time round it took me about 5 hours to get everything back to normal and that time was mostly only taken up by time it took to scan everything. So I do feel that this is very important info, thanks.

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