Viruses and Spyware The Real Story

1. Viruses and Spyware The Real Story Mr. G

2. From Whence Spyware Comes Spyware usually ends up on your machine because of something you do, like clicking a button on a pop-up window, installing a software package or agreeing to add functionality to your Web browser. These applications often use trickery to get you to install them, from fake system alert messages to buttons that say "cancel" when they really install spyware.

3. What Spyware Does Spyware is designed to attach themselves to your operating system in nefarious ways. They can suck the life out of your computer's processing power by tracking your Internet habits, nagging you with unwanted sales offers or generating traffic for their host Web site. It generally isn't designed to damage your computer. .

4. What Is It? Spyware is defined broadly as any program that gets into your computer without your permission and hides in the background while it makes unwanted changes to your user experience. The damage it does is more a by-product of its main mission, which is to serve you targeted advertisements or make your browser display certain sites or search results.

5. Replication A virus is a piece of code designed to replicate itself as many times as possible, spreading from one host computer to any other computers connected to it. It usually has a payload that may damage your personal files or even your operating system.

6. Drive By Download Drive by download is when a Web site or pop-up window automatically tries to download and install spyware on your machine. The only warning you might get would be your browser's standard message telling you the name of the software and asking if it's okay to install it. If your security settings are set low enough, you won't even get the warning.

7. Piggyback Piggybacked spy ware often come from some applications -- particularly peer-to-peer file-sharing clients -- will install spyware as a part of their standard installation procedure

8. Browser add-ons Browser add-ons are pieces of software that add enhancements to your Web browser, like a toolbar, animated pal or additional search box. Sometimes, these really do what they say they'll do but also include elements of spyware as part of the deal. Or sometimes they are nothing more than thinly veiled spyware themselves. Particularly nasty add-ons are considered browser hijackers -- these embed themselves deeply in your machine and take quite a bit of work to get rid of.

9. Dirty Tricks Spyware may masquerade as anti-spyware. This is one of the cruelest tricks in the book. This type of software convinces you that it's a tool to detect and remove spyware. When you run the tool, it tells you your computer is clean while it installs additional spyware of its own. Spyware runs as an application in the background as soon as you start your computer up, hogging RAM and processor power.

10. Pros and Cons: Mostly Cons! What do viruses show us show us how vulnerable we are -- a properly engineered virus can have a devastating affect, disrupting productivity and doing billions of dollars in damages. On the other hand, they show us how sophisticated and interconnected human beings have become.

11. The most common forms of infections are: Viruses - A virus is a small piece of software that piggybacks on real programs. For example, a virus might attach itself to a program such as a spreadsheet program. Each time the spreadsheet program runs, the virus runs, too, and it has the chance to reproduce (by attaching to other programs) or wreak havoc.

12. The most common forms of infections are: E-mail viruses - An e-mail virus travels as an attachment to e-mail messages, and usually replicates itself by automatically mailing itself to dozens of people in the victim's e-mail address book. Some e-mail viruses don't even require a double-click -- they launch when you view the infected message in the preview pane of your e-mail software [source: Johnson].

13. The most common forms of infections Trojan horses - A Trojan horse is simply a computer program. The program claims to do one thing (it may claim to be a game) but instead does damage when you run it (it may erase your hard disk). Trojan horses have no way to replicate automatically.

14. The most common forms of infections are: Worms - A worm is a small piece of software that uses computer networks and security holes to replicate itself. A copy of the worm scans the network for another machine that has a specific security hole. It copies itself to the new machine using the security hole, and then starts replicating from there, as well. Worms use up computer time and network bandwidth when they replicate, and often carry payloads that do considerable damage.

15. The most common forms of infections A worm called Code Red made huge headlines in 2001. Experts predicted that this worm could clog the Internet so effectively that things would completely grind to a halt. A worm usually exploits some sort of security hole in a piece of software or the operating system.

16. The main reasons why people create viruses are to disrupt productivity and do billions of dollars in damages, to watch a disaster unfold, and to brag that they created the most devastating and disruptive virus ever.

17. Factors that brought about viruses were the spread of personal computers in the 1990’s, the use of computer bulletin boards to download programs of all types, and the creation of viruses was the floppy disk

18. New tricks of virus creators were to load viruses into memory so they could keep running in the background as long as the computer remained on, to infect the boot sector on floppy disks and hard disks. Email viruses spread as attachments to emails.

19. You can protect yourself against • viruses with a few simple steps: If you are truly worried about traditional (as opposed to e-mail) viruses, you should be running a more secure operating system like UNIX. You never hear about viruses on these operating systems because the security features keep viruses (and unwanted human visitors) away from your hard disk. If you are using an unsecured operating system, then buying virus protection software is a nice safeguard.

20. You can protect yourself against • viruses with a few simple steps: If you are using an unsecured operating system, then buying virus protection software is a nice safeguard

21. If you simply avoid programs from unknown sources (like the Internet), and instead stick with commercial software purchased on CDs, you eliminate almost all of the risk from traditional viruses. You should make sure that Macro Virus Protection is enabled in all Microsoft applications, and you should NEVER run macros in a document unless you know what they do. There is seldom a good reason to add macros to a document, so avoiding all macros is a great policy.

22. You can protect yourself against • viruses with a few simple steps: You should never double-click on an e-mail attachment that contains an executable. Attachments that come in as Word files (.DOC), spreadsheets (.XLS), images (.GIF), etc., are data files and they can do no damage (noting the macro virus problem in Word and Excel documents mentioned above). However, some viruses can now come in through .JPG graphic file attachments

23. You can protect yourself against • viruses with a few simple steps: A file with an extension like EXE, COM or VBS is an executable, and an executable can do any sort of damage it wants. Once you run it, you have given it permission to do anything on your machine. The only defense is never to run executables that arrive via e-mail.