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Viruses? Spyware? Adware? Spam? What is all this stuff?
Many people are confused about what these things are. They know they're "bad"
but how bad are they? Does it really matter and if so, how can you protect
yourself?
There are a lot of products on the market to help protect you from all these things
with prices ranging from free up to several hundred dollars. We here at NetBungalow
use and strongly recommend the following products: Avast! antivirus and Windows Defender antispyware
(click to find out more).
Spam:
Spam is the Internet equivalent of the junk snail-mail you receive at home
with one major exception: it can contain viruses and/or spyware, and is often the
delivery agent for scams and cons. Spam in and of itself is not dangerous, unless
you consider what it does to your blood pressure while deleting your 25th “Cheap
Replica Watches” ad of the morning, however what it contains can be dangerous.
There is no such thing as a virus that will run itself simply because you read an
email. Let’s say that again: Reading an email will NOT infect your computer. If
an email contains a virus, it will be in an attachment. The ONLY way that you can
get the virus is if you open the attachment, thus allowing it to install.
There are an infinite number of hoaxes out there telling of the newest most dangerous
virus sweeping its way across the world and no antivirus software can detect it
much less clean it. They all tell you to forward the email on to all your friends
and warn them that if they get an email titled such-and-such to delete it immediately
because it will destroy your computer. Oh no!
In reality, spammers send these emails out hoping you’ll forward it to all your
friends, they’ll forward it to all THEIR friends and so on and so forth. Why you
ask? Because when one forwards an email (especially if one’s in a hurry to get it
out to everyone one knows and warn them!), one often does not take the time to clean
up said email and remove all the email addresses of the people it’s been forwarded
to. Eventually it may make its way back the spammer with thousands of email addresses
in the message. That’s thousands of VALID email addresses that the spammer can use
to send more spam to, or sell the list to other spammers so THEY can send the spam.
Nifty, huh?
There is another version of the above spam email that makes the rounds. It says
the same thing, but purports to have the answer! This version tells you, “You MUST
click on some link or install some file in order to protect yourself from the devastating
virus. Don’t worry if your antivirus software says it’s an infected file. It’s a
benign version of the virus that you’re installing. It looks just like the real
virus and when the real virus shows up it will think you are already infected and
pass you by.” That link or file is a virus. You are intentionally installing a virus
on your computer by following the directions.
To reiterate, there is no such thing as a virus that will infect or destroy your
computer simply by receiving it in an email and reading it. The only way to get
a virus through an email is to open an infected attachment.
Spyware/Adware:
Spyware is any software
that installs itself on your computer and monitors what
you are doing. The majority of spyware records your email address and
what webpages you visit, then reports back to a marketer so they can send you advertisement
emails and popups for items you may be more interested in, this is commonly refered
to as Adware. Other spyware is
more dangerous; it will record usernames, passwords and personal information and
send it back to the people or groups who wrote the spyware. Even if you don't
do banking online this is still very dangerous. Anything on your computer
at all can be recorded by spyware. Phone records, bank statements, email,
Quicken info, Amazon.com / Ebay purchases (and the credit card used) and granny's
chicken soup recipe are all things that can be filched by spyware and broadcast
across the Internet without your knowledge.
Most spyware is often installed with other, legitimate software. Usually "free"
trial versions or shareware, but sometimes with purchased products as well.
Sony was recently in the news for putting spyware on many of the music CDs that they distribute. Their
spyware is ostensibly to prevent pirating but it turns out they also collect data
on your listening habits, Internet address, web browser and operating system then
transmits it back to one of their advertising servers.
Viruses:
Viruses can do anything that spyware can do and much, much more. Unfortunately,
spyware is often confused for a virus. Many people will get spyware on their system
and think they have a virus because they keep getting popups even when they’re not
on the Internet, or they get automatically routed to pages they do not want to go
to, or they can’t get to certain pages because every time they type in the address
it takes them to somewhere inappropriate. These are all behaviors of spyware: cheap
tricks and the computer equivalent of sleight of hand.
In reality, viruses are
much less common than spyware, but many times more dangerous. Viruses come in many
forms but the majority of them do not want you to know they are there. A virus will
rarely advertise its presence in any vulgar fashion such as making web pages to
adult content sites appear. Unlike spyware, viruses are programs that are generally
designed to lay low until called upon to execute whatever function they were written
to fulfill. Viruses typically have three characteristics: a method of replicating
themselves, a trigger, and an objective.
Viruses replicate themselves a number
of ways. Some send themselves out as attachments in emails, others infect documents
(such as Word or Word Perfect) waiting for the document to be opened by someone
else, and some infect a section of hard and floppy disks known as the “boot sector”
and wait to be put into an uninfected computer and read into memory.
Virus triggers
are as varied as the wind. The trigger can be a date or a time, it can be running
a certain program or going to a specific web site. The trigger could be your screen
saver coming on or the act of turning on / shutting down your computer. Anything
can be a trigger, but a virus can only be triggered if it is already infecting your
computer. Reading an email cannot trigger a virus attached to the email unless the
virus is already infecting your computer or you open the attachment the virus is
stored in.
As for an objective, they often run along the same basic lines. Some
types of viruses create a “back door” into your system that allows others into your
computer without your knowledge; it would not show on your computer screen what
someone was doing through a backdoor. Using this back door, unsavory individuals
could copy files to and from your computer, delete files on your computer, and use
your Internet connection to send spam and attack other computers and networks.
Other types of viruses overwrite certain types of files with a message or junk data.
These are the computer virus equivalent of graffiti spray painted on a building:
juvenile AND destructive.
Another type of virus is a key-logger. It records every
keystroke you make and sends it back to the virus creator, or stores it in a file
for later retrieval.
You hear about them all the time but the actual occurrences
of a super destructive virus that wipes out all the data on your computer is incredibly
rare. These do exist but are hardly considered viruses, as they do not spread themselves.
They are designed for a targeted attack to wipe out someone’s system. They install
covertly, like a virus, and wait for a trigger then start wiping out data. If you
got one of these, it was likely intentionally directed at you and not something
you picked up by accident.
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