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.

A worm is a small piece of software that will use a computers networks and securities to replicate itself. The worm will scan the network for more machines that may have this specific security hole. If it finds one, it will copy itself to the new computer and using the security hole, will then replicate itself again and again in this manner.

Worms can work in many ways and one of the most common ways is through emails. They can attach themselves to your contact list and then send emails out to everyone on your list. This is an ingenious way to get the worm spread around since most people see no harm in opening an email that originates from someone they know and trust.

Computer Worms Detection

Over the years I have found a foolproof way to discover whether a worm has attached itself to my contact list. Create a contact named AAAAA, five A’s should be plenty. List AAAAA’s email address as your own. This way if a worm attaches itself to your computer and sends out a worm to all of your contacts, you will be the first one to get it. Should you ever open your email and find an email from AAAAA in there, you will know that a worm has attached itself and can then send out another email warning your contacts to avoid emails from your address until you have corrected the problem.

W32/MSNworm.EI.worm, which spreads via the MSN Messenger and displays a funny picture of a little pig sending you a kiss while it is infecting your computer.

MSNworm.EI is a worm whose main objective is to spread and affect as many computers as possible. The means it uses to spread is the instant messaging program MSN Messenger.

Additionally, it downloads the backdoor detected as IRCBot.BWB to the affected computer. The variants belonging to the IRCBot family are designed to connect to several IRC servers and receive remote control commands.

MSNworm.EI is easy to recognize, as it reaches the computer via the instant messaging program MSN Messenger, in an instant message which contains a file.

When the file is run, the following image is displayed:

source: www.pandasecurity.com | pandalabs.pandasecurity.com

You’ve taken this course in internet safety and learnt all that there is to learn about how to avoid viruses and worms. You have installed advanced virus scanners, so nothing can pass through your email program and infect your Operating System, nor be downloaded from the internet or from a removable medium. You have installed the latest and the greatest in firewalls, so no worm can take advantage of open ports on your system. You are careful not to download, execute or use programs from any source other than well known, trusted groups or companies, like the vendor of your Operating System, or maybe the Free Software Foundation. All in all, you have got your system locked down very tightly, and fully expect to remain free of malware for the rest of your days.

And to propagate this useful knowledge, you then fire up your favorite instant messaging program, which may be MSN Messenger or Yahoo! Messenger. You open a chat window with your friend to tell him or her all about his wonderful new way you have found of securing your computer so that nothing happens to it, ever and ever. You are surprised to see that she is already offering you a file before you have started your conversation. Thinking it must be important for her to be that anxious, you click ‘accept’. Seconds later, you realize your education was not complete, as the recently downloaded worm munches through your files and folders, and hoses your hard drive.
If you are a believer in learning through experience, then skip this article and wait till it happens to you. If however you’d rather learn by example, be advised that the horror flick given above was due to a new type of malware, the IM worm, which is unsurprisingly a worm that propagates itself through instant messaging programs.
The worst thing about IM worms is that most virus scanners haven’t yet evolved enough to be able to deal with them. And firewalls do not catch them because they come through an already established and authorized channel opened by yourself – you authorized it when you opened the chat program.

IM worms depend for their survival and multiplication upon this irresistible urge that most users have of clicking ‘ok’ in response to whatever dialog box appears in front of their face, specially if that box happens to be launched by the IM program and more specially if it happens to tell you of a new file that your friend has just offered. They go on clicking ‘ok’ mindlessly, as if it gives them some kind of undefinable pleasure to be able to do this without thinking or pausing. And then when they get busted they blame their stupid computer, their worthless OS, their malicious friend and so forth. But the truth is that the friend probably had nothing to do with the worm in the first place. The worm was just camouflaging itself by pretending to be from him or her.

What can you do to escape this latest in malware? Well, for one thing ask your friend whether he/she is really offering you this file. Worms haven’t yet evolved to the point where they can answer this question in place of your friend.

Secondly, dump the regular IM clients like MSN Messenger or Yahoo! Messenger, and install another program through which you can connect to both of these networks and many more, but which doesn’t contain the type of vulnerability that allow worms to pass through.

Beware of worms in your computer. When I say worms, in case you are a complete newbie in the field, you should know that they are not real worms. Worms are, in fact, a kind of program which enter your pc. You will never know, but in your computer will reside a program foreign to your needs. And in probability it, or more likely they will steal your delicate information for somebody with doubtful motives.

Does that sound like a thriller in the making? Well, it should, but also, it is the truth. Last year, bank frauds cost decent people around the world billions of dollars. And most of the money that got siphoned was lost due to faulty security. Your computer might be the next target.

Unaware, you might invite that Trojan Horse which will ruin your finances for good for the rest of your life. Therefore, be careful. Do not let worms into your computer as you would never let worms in your food.

But you must know about worms first. What are they actually? Are they viruses? Or are they like spyware?

In a way they resemble viruses, but in another way they are even deadlier than a virus. For, what a virus does is, it lodges itself into a program. It becomes dependent on that specific program. It, of course, has the capabilities of ruining your database, but it still needs a medium to propagate itself. A worm, however, is a different cup of tea altogether. A worm propagates without the need of a medium. And that is why it is, often, more dangerous than a virus. Because it is a virus without a few weaknesses of the computer virus.

What happens in this case is, while a virus must spread itself through other programs, mails and such, a worm can independently replicate itself throughout a system. This makes a network very unstable. The threat is that, once you have a system of computers connected to each other, one of the computers getting a worm through the internet would potentially threaten all the computers in the system.
The name ‘worm’ comes from a 1975 science fiction by John Brunner called The Shockwave Rider. There was a striking similarity found between what Brunner described and the ‘worm’ as it is to be found now.

The first worm in the world was created by a team of computer engineers at Xerox PARC as early as 1978. The intention then was, however, beneficial. It was a program, which was designed to search through a network, find idle machines, and divide the workload equally to them. This was of course, for the benefit of the network. However, this scenario changed when in 1988 Robert Tappan Morris, a graduate student at Cornell University devised a similar program,, yet with a different agenda. Morris received three years of probation, 400 hours of community service and a hefty fine.

It is always judicious to use a firewall and a secure operating system and a secure browser when you have to surf the net extensively. Because, once a worm gets in, it is very hard to cleanse your system.