How to Identify Virus or Spyware Attack?
When you’re hit by a bad virus attack, it becomes pretty obvious, pretty fast. Your computer starts to behave oddly. Here are a few symptoms you might see individually or in combination: Frequent crashes or system restarts, Very slow or erratic performance, No Internet connection. Email in Sent Items folder of your email program that you personally didn’t send. Missing or corrupt data or system files. The computer fails to start and displays errors.
As soon as you think you might be infected with a virus, immediately use your antivirus program to update its virus signaturesthese are snapshots of viruses used by the program to identify an infection. All antivirus programs have this feature built in. You click an update button in the software and the updates are fetched from the Internet.
Then use the antivirus program to run a system scan. Choose to run a deep or thorough scan, if possible, as opposed to a quick scan.
Disconnect As Soon As Possible
One of the first things most malware tries to do when it creates an infectionand this especially includes virusesis to make contact with the outside world. So one of the first things you should do after detecting an infection (after updating your virus and spyware signatures via the Internet) is to disconnect your computer from your home network, if you have one, and get off the Internet.
Virus Infection Found! How to Cleanse Your System
When the antivirus program finds a virus, it alerts you immediately and asks for a decision. Make a note of the virus’s name and have it removed.
If your antivirus program fails to remove the virus, all is not lost. It could be that infected files are running and so they can’t be deleted by Windows. Try scanning the computer in Windows Safe Mode. This is a special emergency mode in which Windows starts up in a raw state and loads only the bare necessities into memory.
To get into safe mode, shut down and restart the computer. When the screen is black (and before the Windows logo appears), hit the F8 key. You might have to press the F8 key a few times to trigger it. A menu appears. Use the arrow key to choose Safe Mode, and press Enter.
If you are presented with a choice of Windows logins (one for you, your spouse, and your hairy little children, perhaps), choose the administrator login. If it’s your computer, chances are that you are the administrator.
When the Windows desktop appears in safe mode, run your antivirus program and scan the system for viruses. Because safe mode loads only the necessary processes in memory, the virus is not loaded unless it has infected one of the system files that makes Windows run. In safe mode, you should be able to easily kill the virus.
Your antivirus program might ask if it should quarantine the virus or delete it. If you quarantine the files, they are put in the computer equivalent of jail, an electronically walled-off area where they can’t cause any further damage. From the quarantine area, they can be submitted to the antivirus maker for analysis, if you choose to do this. If you choose to delete the snared virus, it is wiped from your computer.
Who Creates Computer Viruses?
Computer viruses are written by a variety of perpetrators. Historically they have been brilliant teenage kids or desperate people in search of attention. They are typically male and in their teens or early 20s. However, David L. Smith, author of the famous Melissa virus, was 30 when the FBI caught up with him.
It’s an ill-conceived strategy, of course. No one in the antivirus industry will go near them. Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, an antivirus company, said in a posting to the company website, “It’s hard to tell if the creators of these new versions of the MyDoom worm are being serious, but there is no way that anybody in the anti-virus industry would touch them with a bargepole,” adding, “It’s very simpleif you write a virus, we will never ever employ you. Not only is it unethical to write malicious code, but it raises issues as to whether you could ever be trusted to develop the software which protects millions of users around the world from attack every day.”
Nowadays, virus writers don’t need much programming savvy to write a decent virus. They just modify existing viruses creating what are called variants. The programming code is widely available on the Internet. Virus writers, hiding behind pseudonyms, even meet anonymously in chatrooms and swap tips, tricks, and bragging rights.
Ultimately, most motivations behind virus writing these days are financial. The virus turns your computer into a zombie, which is a computer that can be remotely controlled by a hacker or virus writer to do malicious tasks such as send spam or to attack another computer by sending a flood of data at it across the Internet in what are called distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks.
Spam makes money for the virus writer by distributing massive volumes of junk email. DDoS attacks work via extortion. A wealthy corporation receives an email that demands a lump sum payment in return for protection. If the demand isn’t paid, the perpetrator remotely commands all the zombies to attack and crash the company’s server. Gambling web sites are often targets of these schemes.
Security Basics: What Is a Computer Virus?
A decade or so ago, viruses were pretty simple. They got into a system and infected a file or two. It was a basic as ordering coffee when coffee was easy to order. “One coffee pleaseblack.”
Today, the catalog of viruses you have to defend yourself against is frighteningly complex. In fact, it’s become as complex as, well, ordering coffee.
“Looks like you’ve been infected by a dropper that’s put a Trojan on your system, which deployed a multi-partite that opened a backdoor and also infected the master boot record.”
Sounds like an order at Starbucks, don’t you think?
These days a discussion about a virus can actually occur without using the word virus because sometimes viruses are worms or Trojan horses, which are virus-like nasties that act a little different than their infectious cousins.
A decade or so ago, viruses were pretty simple. They got into a system and infected a file or two. It was a basic as ordering coffee when coffee was easy to order. “One coffee pleaseblack.”
Today, the catalog of viruses you have to defend yourself against is frighteningly complex. In fact, it’s become as complex as, well, ordering coffee.
“Looks like you’ve been infected by a dropper that’s put a Trojan on your system, which deployed a multi-partite that opened a backdoor and also infected the master boot record.”
Sounds like an order at Starbucks, don’t you think?
These days a discussion about a virus can actually occur without using the word virus because sometimes viruses are worms or Trojan horses, which are virus-like nasties that act a little different than their infectious cousins.
Why are they called computer viruses? Well, because they have similar characteristics to biological viruses that infect humansin at least one way. The computer variety jumps from computer to computer much like a cold virus jumps from your kids to you and from you to your spouse.
Don’t let all this frighten you, though. It’s not that hard to figure out and defending your computer against viruses is pretty straightforward. Still, if the idea makes you queasy, skip ahead to the part of the chapter about how to easily protect yourself from viruses. But I hope you stick around because the more you know, the geekier you will be. Okay, not really. But understanding them makes them much less scary.
Viruses were one of the first real security threats people had to deal with when personal computers started appearing in homes a couple of decades ago. The first computer viruses were written in the 1980s; however, they really didn’t become a big threat until the late 1990s when everyone who owned a personal computer started connecting to the Internet.
Before then viruses spread via floppy disks or CDs. They would ride on the back of files stored on a disk or in the boot area of the floppy and replicate when the disk was inserted into the computer.
The Internet’s popularity has also become the chief reason that security on personal computers has become such a hot topic. A Net connection is the off-ramp from the Internet into your computer for all data. And guess what? For viruses it’s an express lane.
Before we go any further, let’s define what a computer virus is because it’s important to understand that before we start smacking them with a hammer. Here’s a basic definition:
It is a malicious computer program that, when executed by an unsuspecting human, performs tasks that primarily include replicating itself and in some cases deploying a payload.
Not so hard, right? Let’s break it down into easy-to-chew pieces.
Interestingly, viruses were first conceived in 1949, when computer pioneer John von Neumann wrote a paper theorizing that programs could become self-replicating. Von Neumann’s theories came to life in the 1950s at Bell Labs where programmers created a game called “Core Wars” in which two players could unleash software “organisms” into the mainframe computer and watch as they competed for control of the machine. It would take more than 30 years for computer viruses to become a threat, but when PCs started becoming commonplace in homes and schools in the early 1980s, computer viruses could replicate and move from computer to computerfirst by infected floppies, and later via networked PCs.