The Danger of Viruses

Viruses are ever on the increase, with more and more devastating consequences.

How do you get a virus?

1) From a Floppy Disk or CD loaded into your computer

2) As an attachment to an Email

3) Downloaded from a website while surfing the net

4) Uploaded to your PC from the Internet if your PC has no firewall or anti-virus software.

Where do viruses come from?

They are malicious programs written by people. The development of viruses is now becoming more sinister and targeted. No longer is it just the lone enthusiast trying to impress his hacker friends, but now it has become part of the criminal syndicate's arsenal.

During early summer of 2004, we saw a rapid growth in the number of home PC’s connected to the Internet by broadband. With this growth many were compromised by two viruses Netsky and Bagle. These two viruses were controlled by rival crime syndicates which were designed to take remote control of home computers. “Zombie Botnets” the name for a collection of these compromised home PCs, are of great cash value to the criminal syndicates for renting out to spammers.

Zero-Hour Viruses

In the second half of 2005 we saw yet another breed of highly focused viruses designed primarily to extend the "Zombie Botnets" which are known as "Zero-Hour" Viruses.

Every new virus that is released has to be identified by the antivirus companies and an update issued for their antivirus software program to enable your PC to be protected from this new virus. Developing these updates can take anything from 3 to 20 hours depending on the virus' complexity.

These new "Zero-Hour" Viruses are exploiting the time interval for the AV companies to produce an update. The spammers send out the virus as an attachment just for the period of time the AV companies take to issue an update. As soon as the update is available, the spammers stop distributing that virus and release a new modified virus for another zero-hour period.

Detecting and preventing "Zero-Hour" viruses is the challenge for the early part of 2006 but there are solutions being developed.

The Solutions

1) Spam and Email Viruses

The largest source of virus infection comes from virus infected emails, either as Spam or from infected PC's of friends. The virus propigates itself by sending out emails to all the people in the machines mailing list. The most effective way to stop this kind of virus infection is to subscribe to an Email Filtering Service. With an Email Filtering Service like SecureDesk-Mail it not only stops viruses by checking all emails with at least two leading Antivirus engines but stops all types of Spam arriving also. Since the early part of 2006, SecureDesk-Mail has also introduce new technology to prevent the Zero-Hour Viruses.

2) Viruses from non-email sources

Besides subscribing to an Email Filtering service to block virused emails, it is important to have an up to date anti-virus program running on your PC. To keep safe from viruses, there are two key things you need to do:-

a) Ensure that you download updates regularily (daily if you can).

b) Run a full virus scan on your computer regularily to ensure your computer is not infected. Viruses are around before the Anti-Virus companies can prevent them, so it is very possible that your PC can contract a virus before your anti-virus software knows about it. It is therefore important that after you have updated your anti-virus program, you then run a full scan on your PC to ensure that no viruses sneaked in before the Anti-Virus program could detect them.

Choose a Good Anti-Virus Program

There are various vendors of anti-virus software including McAfee, Norton and Sophos to name a few. Avira, a lesser known vendor also offers a good solution.

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Some Viruses prevent Anti-Virus Software loading

If you get contaminated by a virus which disables antivirus software, you often cannot get rid of it by installing a new anti-virus program. To resolve this issue Anti-Virus companies offer various stratigic tools to either deal with individual viruses or generaic tools which specifically targets agressive viruses that prevent AntiVirus software loading. One such generic tool which is updated everytime a new agressive virus is discovered, is Stinger from McAfee. You can downlaod Stinger from the following link, always make sure you download the latest version before you run it.

McAfee Stinger

Malicious Code is sometimes not detected by Anti-Virus

Viruses sometimes bring malcious code which when the orginal virus is deleted remains on your PC. Microsoft offer an on-line detection tool for maliciaous code, which is updated the first Tuesday of every month. To check your machine for trojans and Bot engines etc., follow the link below and select the button "Check My PC for Infection"

Microsoft Maclious Software Removal Tool