Don’t Threaten Me!

Computer virus – what are they, how do we get them, and how do we rid ourselves of them?

This module was interesting learning about computer viruses and how they work. There is a great article on this topic on the website HowStuffWorks. It is amazing how such a simple program can cause so much damage.

Then we moved on to learning about botnets or zombie armies, which ever name you prefer to call them. It appears that just having your computer connected to the internet unprotected can have an ill effect upon you and millions of others. Here is a great article about this from the NY Times.

The third part of this module was learning how a hacker works. What are the tools that a hacker uses? There is another great article on this from HowStuffWorks. There is also a video that goes with this and I am only sharing this because there is some good that can come from it. I DO NOT encourage any illicit or illegal behavior by watching this video.

Finally we looked at fixing a zombie computer. Unfortunately the best fix is a complete system wipe and restorations. Basically this means format your hard drive and start from scratch re-installing all your software. Your computer will basically be back to factory original. Once again HowStuffWorks has a great article on this.

Let us start out by defining a computer virus. What is it? According to the website HowStuffWorks, here are some definitions of viruses, trojans, and worms:

­­When you listen to the news, you hear about many different forms of electronic infection. The most common 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.

·         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].

·         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.

·         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.

Now that we have that out of the way, we should move on to how we get these vicious programs on our computers. Here is a short video demonstrating how email can be used against you and what to watch out for.

I currently use four different anti-virus programs. I don’t advise doing this, because it took me the better part of a week to get all four programs to play nice together and not delete each other. I am using the currently ranked top four free apps.

1.     Avast!

2.     Avira AntiVir Personal

3.     AVG Anti-Virus

4.     Microsoft Security Essentials

If you are unfortunate enough to acquire a virus of any kind on your computer and are not successful at eradicating it from your system you may have one last option before formatting your hard drive and starting over from scratch. That option is System Restore. Using system restore you can turn back time so to speak. You can restore your computer to a previous state from the past at a point in time that you are positive that your computer did not have the virus on it. I am using Vista so after performing a right mouse button click and selecting properties, the following window appears. I then clicked on System Protection which opened up a new window called System Properties with the System protection Tab visible. Next i clicked on System Restore button to topen the System Restore window. Here are the options for my computer to restore it to a previous good state. I can not show any other windows beyond this because i do not want to lose everything that I currently do not have backed up at this point.