If you’ve been infected with malware like a Trojan or spyware, you probably already know that getting rid of them is difficult, time-consuming and costly. Malware is easy to distribute and spread around the Internet, now more than ever before. You can spend hours surfing the web, playing online games and downloading files, only to visit a website and be redirected to an adware or spyware site. Surfing online again after a malware infection can be nerve wracking, to say the least. (pokerace99)
So what can you do about malware problems?
- Don’t be ashamed to report malware.
Even if you’re sure it’s malware and you know it, you may still want to hide it. If you are too embarrassed to report it to everyone you know, there may be people who, unknowingly, come to the same conclusion. If everyone you know does not know you face a higher risk of being infected in the future.
- Remove it with force.
Even if you find it not worth taking out, you can manually remove the problem. This may be faster, easier and more effective than following a guide.
- Make a boot able disk.
Make a boot able disk that you can use as a second boot able Linux CD in case you don’t have one of those fancy rescue disks. You may be infected by a boot able CD but your computer is probably infected by malware anyway. Infected Windows users can use Bob Seger’s famous boot able CD to fix problems.
- Create a rescue disk.
If you are infected by a Trojan that makes it necessary to boot from a CD, you can make a rescue disk that you can use to recover your computer. This is assuming you haven’t made any changes to the computer that make it virus-free.
- Clean up your CD.
Before you use the CD to go on a wild ride, make sure all the files on it have data. This includes run scripts, modifications to the files, and files that are created by the running program. If you don’t do this the computer will not be able to find the files and you will receive an error message.
- Make sure you are using Windows.
Only use Windows if you are certain that the operating system is thoroughly virus-cleansed. You might be using Windows 98, but the making of a virus that works in 95 isn’t as effective as one that works in ME, XP, 2000, and 2003.
- Avoid the peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing programs.
They areplaces where malware and viruses are literally right out in the open. You may not know it, but you are downloading viruses and putting them on your computer. When they finish, all you have to do is turn your computer off, because that’s what they want you to do.
- Do not open email attachments with friends.
They may be trying to tell you something, but you cannot be assured until you click on the attachment and open it. If you do, you are inviting a virus to infect your computer. All you need to do is turn off you computer and then run the software to kill it.
- Do not open unsolicited email (spam) at all.
Unless you are using security such as Rise up Firewall, you should never open an unsolicited email. Some viruses will replicate themselves by sending an email addressed to you containing specially written messages. The first step is to safeguard sign off all mail from you and seeing that no one has obtained your email address. If Rise up Firewall is enabled, the software will automatically scan all messages and send you a message when it discovers one or more messages that might be phishing.
- Report all phishing scams to the organization directly.
The people who write the phishing messages need to be notified that they are receiving a certain amount of spam. They can either email these people or point them to a website where they can report the scams. Either way, this is the right way to do it. You will want to verify with the company that they are actually sending you legitimate emails so that you are not consists ofenders.
For the organization to actually do something about it, they will have to decide whether or not they want to actively participate or if they want to approach the problem from the Internet. The problem is that they will leave you with an endless number of spammers so it will never get better. If they take a proactive approach, however, they can stave off the problems and you can finally enjoy the inversely proportional relationship between the threats and the actually experienced risks.