Viruses:

Viruses — A virus is a small piece of soft­ware that repli­cates itself. 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. E-​​mail viruses — An e-​​mail virus moves around in e-​​mail mes­sages, and usu­ally repli­cates itself by auto­mat­i­cally mail­ing itself to dozens of peo­ple in the victim’s e-​​mail address book. 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. Tro­jan horses — A Tro­jan horse is sim­ply a com­puter pro­gram. The pro­gram claims to do one thing (it may claim to be a game, or a “free” piece of soft­ware) but instead does dam­age when you run it (it may erase your hard disk). Tro­jan horses have no way to repli­cate auto­mat­i­cally. They are called Tro­jan horses because they are some­times dis­guised as nor­mal com­puter programs.

Spy­ware:

Spy­ware is defined as any soft­ware that covertly gath­ers user infor­ma­tion through the user’s Inter­net con­nec­tion with­out his or her knowl­edge, usu­ally for adver­tis­ing pur­poses. Spy­ware appli­ca­tions are typ­i­cally bun­dled as a hid­den com­po­nent of free­ware or share­ware pro­grams that can be down­loaded from the Inter­net; how­ever, it should be noted that the major­ity of share­ware and free­ware appli­ca­tions do not come with spy­ware. Once installed, the spy­ware mon­i­tors user activ­ity on the Inter­net and trans­mits that infor­ma­tion in the back­ground to some­one else. Spy­ware can also gather infor­ma­tion about e-​​mail addresses and even pass­words and credit card numbers.

Spy­ware often causes “pop-​​up” adver­tise­ments to appear on the user’s screen, with­out the user’s knowl­edge or con­sent. These pop-​​ups can be quite a headache, and spy­ware itself often slows down com­put­ers to a slow crawl.

Because spy­ware exists as inde­pen­dent exe­cutable pro­grams, they have the abil­ity to mon­i­tor key­strokes, scan files on the hard drive, snoop other appli­ca­tions, such as chat pro­grams or word proces­sors, install other spy­ware pro­grams, read cook­ies, change the default home page on the Web browser, con­sis­tently relay­ing this infor­ma­tion back to the spy­ware author who will either use it for advertising/​marketing pur­poses or sell the infor­ma­tion to another party. When the home page of your web browser changes with­out your knowl­edge or con­sent, this is referred to a home-​​page hijacking.

Some­times, a com­puter is so badly infected with viruses and spy­ware that the harm­ful soft­ware can­not be removed with­out com­pletely for­mat­ting the hard drive (delet­ing all files) and rein­stalling the oper­at­ing sys­tem. Now is when you con­tact your com­puter repair store.  Ask for the com­puter virus repair tech­ni­cian.  The tech will offer a data backup solu­tion and note which pro­grams you had installed, and then per­form a BFR (Backup, For­mat, Rein­stall, Restore) on your sys­tem. When the virus and spy­ware removal is com­pleted, ask for instruc­tions on how to run the pro­grams that were installed to pre­vent viruses and spy­ware from com­pro­mis­ing your sys­tem in the future.

This arti­cle was pre­pared and writ­ten by Jeff Atto of Con­cise Com­puter Con­sult­ing, LLC, located at 2150 Franklin Road, Bloom­field Hills, MI. Please con­tact us for any ques­tion about your home com­puter or lap­top. 248−745−8255 My email address is info@​concisePC.​com and our web­site is http://​www​.con​cisePC​.com

This arti­cle was sub­mit­ted by Right Now Mar­ket­ing Group, LLC

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