What are the top ways that people can get viruses on their computers?

Emails – All of those inspirational or chain letter emails seem tempting and friendly, however, they are also one of the highest at risk for computer viruses to be embedded within them. It is in your best interest to forget about how much money you may get for forwarding it to everyone on your list, as instead of earning money, you may just find yourself spending it to purchase a new computer, or to fix your now broken one because of that inspirational chain letter.

Executable Files – Games, software, programs that promise that if you use them you will never get another virus again. All of these should be considered malicious until you can prove they are not. Running virus scanners or trojan cleaners on any program that requires execution is always the safest precaution that you can take.

Links – Clicking a link seems a very innocent and harmless thing to do. However, some links themselves can be embedding with coding that can cause your computer to pick up a virus without your knowledge. If you ever open a link that brings up a very quick dos box that just as quickly disappears. Do NOT reboot your computer until you have run every virus scanner and trojan remover that you have in your arsenal.

Pictures – Pictures from your spouse, children or grandchildren can be tempting to open right away. You know these people right? So why not trust that what they are sending is perfectly safe.

These suggestions will help not only you prevent you from getting a virus, but also for everyone who may be on your contact list.

Unfortunately for any computer user viruses and Spyware are a common problem. The worst part is that most people are not aware of some things that may install Spyware or other malicious items onto their computers. Most people wrongly assume that they have to download something or open themselves up to a vulnerability manually. This is not always true.

How Do I Keep Getting Spyware?

Actually, one of the main ways that hackers have found is the easiest to use to get PC users to execute their malicious software is through emails. All of those inspirational or chain emails can be the biggest source of problems for some users who do not even frequent sites that may contain Spyware or viruses.
All of those nice inspirational emails can have malicious coding embedded that may cause security vulnerabilities within your computer. Clicking links that you are unsure of inside emails is also a great way to install Spyware on your system.

For new users this may be the biggest problems. Most people who regularly use computers for personal or business related activities are aware of the dangers of the internet and the possibility of getting Spyware of viruses. However, most think that in order to get them, you have to execute a program. This is entirely untrue.

Delete Those Emails Before You Open Them!

Whatever the title and whomever it has come from does not matter. Always keep in mind that others may not know the dangers of simple emails or links as well. The best way to deal with emails from unfamiliar sources or emails that contain inspirational or chain letter type messages is to delete them as soon as possible. Do not open them ever!

By Spyware News (www.spywarenews.org) – It would seem that NebuAd, the behavioral targeted advertising protocol used by some Internet Service Providers, is basically like a version of Gator that works at the ISP level. For those of you too young to remember, Gator is one of the frontrunners of spyware/adware distribution a few years ago. Their program came bundled in with programs such as download managers and configuration tweakers, and tracked your surfing and browsing patterns so that it can serve targeted advertisements. The company later changed its name from Gator to Claria in order to get rid of their negative image as spyware distributors.

NebuAd is currently under heavy criticism after being revealed to use TCP/IP packet monitoring in order to intercept, modify and alter contents of Internet packets that are being sent and received while consumers are surfing. NebuAd’s sophisticated deep packet inspection capabilities and the fact that consumers are not made aware of its capabilities or even its existence makes it no less than a spyware or malware program.

Despite a number of spyware companies in proliferation, the real piece of information that ties NebuAd with Gator is the leaked information that both Claria and NebuAd share at least 5 VP-level ranking employees.

NebuAd has not denied the presence of said former Claria employees but tried to downplay the involvement by claiming that the two company’s connections are tenuous at best. People are even more suspicious after finding out that NebuAd, like Claria, is based in Redwood City, CA and has registered its domain in June 2006, the exact same month and year when Claria left the adware business. – www.spywarenews.org

What Next? Spread the word.

Zango is an adware which monitors the web sites and URLs that you visit, and generates popup adverstiments every few minutes.

Instruction to remove Zango from your pc

1. Go to Start > Settings > Control Panel > Add or Remove Programs
2. Find Zango on the list
4. Click the Change/Remove button
5. Check the component(s) you wish to remove, click Next and follow on-screen instructions
6. Restart your computer

or download uninstaller from Zango

http://corporate.zango.com/support/faqs.aspx#a2

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Web surfing offers many different kinds of experience – the useful and the redundant, the profitable and the idle, the regular and the bizarre. And certainly one of the strangest experiences is when you try to visit a familiar page and suddenly find yourself on a completely different one, related or unrelated to the page you were trying to reach. What happened? Has the website changed its business?

Actually, the page got jacked. Perhaps you were searching for the page in a search engine, and got a link which you thought should be what you were looking for. But when you clicked on the link, you found that you were in the wrong place. Even wrong enough to get you embarrassed when there are other people nearby. Search engines do not make that kind of mistake, so what happened was the page go jacked, which fooled the search engine into thinking that it was relevant for your search.
You know how the internet works. There are banner ads and other kinds of ads which earn revenue for that site, and that is how they make a profit. Websites and businesses for alliances among themselves, and carry each other’s ads on their sites. When you got to a particular site and click on an ad that you find interesting, the original website gains some amount of money from the site to which your click takes you. So it’s possible for websites to make a profit from your visit. Naturally, they want you to visit their page.

That all fine and acceptable, as long as they use legitimate means of bringing you to their site. Like optimize their site for search engines, or promote their site in some other way. But when they become too eager, they sometimes cross the line between what’s acceptable what what isn’t. And sometimes they use pagejacking.
Sometimes in order to increase the rating of some visitor-starved website, the whole content of a popular site is copied by an unscrupulous webmaster and duplicated on his own site. This is done merely in order to fool the search engines into thinking that it was the original item. And when this ploy works, the duplicate site appears among the top results returned by a search engine on a search made using the relevant key words or phrases.

This increases the chance that users will click on that link on the results page, without looking to carefully at the address to which it leads. And when they do, they will be taken to the duplicate site briefly, before being automatically redirected to another site – the one that could use some visitors to generate revenue. This is known as pagejacking.
As a user, there is little you can do in order to prevent this kind of nuisance, except be more careful about the actual URL of the link you’re clicking on the search engine results page. If you are opening asite from your bookmarks, or typing in the URL directly, there’s no chance of your being duped by a pagejacker.

If you’re the owner or the maintainer of the website that got jacked, however, it’s a different story. The main way you can hit back against the offenders is by suing them or threatening to sue under the copyright law. The content and design of your website is copyright material, and they’re violating you copyright by reproducing it without your permission. So send them a formal letter asking them to cease and desist, and follow it up with a letter from your lawyer. Pagejackers are normally sniveling cowards, and this should suffice to solve the problem. If it doesn’t, however, do not hesitate to go to court – you’re sure to win this one, and also get compensation for the business you lost because of this obstruction.

Adware pushers have found a new way to trick you into downloading their annoying products: fake MP3 files.

On Tuesday, security vendor McAfee reported that it’s seen a huge spike in fake MP3 files spreading on peer-to-peer networks. Although the files have names that make them look like audio recordings, they’re really Trojan horse programs that try to install a shoddy media player and adware on your computer, said Craig Schmugar, a researcher with McAfee.

“Once you run it, there is no content. You’re taken to this site to install this player which you don’t really need,” he said.

Fake file names include: preview-t-3545425-changing times earth wind .mp3 and t-3545425-just got lucky.mp3. Users are first asked to OK an end-user license agreement before the Trojan installs two programs, Mirar and NetNucleus, on their PCs.

Ironically, while the Mirar software tells users that it doesn’t display popups, NetNucleus does deliver popup ads, so users who do not realize that they are installing two programs might feel tricked, Schmugar said. “You have a Window telling you that there are no popups and right behind it is a popup.”

Although McAfee has seen some nasty software disguising itself as media files in the past, it has never seen anything on this scale, Schmugar said. Over the past 24 hours, nearly a third of the McAfee customers who reported data back to the security company have detected these files, he said.

In the past few days McAfee has spotted the files on more than 360,000 users’ desktops.

Tags: McAfee, Adware, Trojan

source:www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/145567/trojan_adware_hiding_in_mp3s_mcafee_says.html

There are many programs out there that can help you with Spy ware and Mal ware protection.

Some of the best programs to us are as follows;

The Cleaner Trojan checker For Trojan checker.
Male-ware Protection – http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php
AVG – Offers free virus protection for your pc without causing vulnerabilities

Many other are available but be sure you get them from reputable services. All information secured on hard drives makes some people thing they are secure. They are NOT if they do not follow the simple instructions to avoid opening up our computer to malicious attacks.