» Antivirus protection «
Introduction
I like Norton Antivirus myself, but each to there own, either way, I consider AV software and firewalls essential! My friend reckons I am obsessively paranoid, I reckon I'm covering my back.
Over the years I have seen more viruses than I care. Bearing in mind I'm talking about retail boxed kosher products, I have seen and suffered these buggers from half the world's top companies. These include:
- Infected bundles of Microsoft Windows/MS DOS 6.22 (You still owe me for those returns Bill!!!)
- Not personally, but Microsoft have been dissed a few times since for additional "bugs" in developer packs
- Fake alerts on a magazine cover disk (caused by algorithms in AV software)
- A virus on an early PC games magazine cover disk - they went out of publication the following month, strangely enough...
- Adobe Pagemaker had a payload once
- Intel Pentium chip with a Trojan on a driver disk
- And the doozy, I was the first person in the world to catch the "Shoo" virus. Kudos to Dr Solomon and his staff for quickly sorting me a fix - And a swift kick up the backside to Future Domain (since taken over by Adaptec) and some no-mark employee in their Singapore factory who
wrote the virus to teach his employees a lesson for not giving him a promotion.
Trojans, Viruses and Spam
I can't remember the exact figure, but (2005) about 70% of Spam is believed to be sent via infected home and small office computers.
Insanely, I've heard (younger) people laugh it all of, it doesn't matter to them greatly.
The same young people have begged for assistance when viruses have crashed their hard drive or deleted all their college assignments or work projects...
Then we have key loggers used to hack into your network, others to steal your identity and credit card details, others to... well, you get the picture.
If you follow my Anti-Spam section, you will know I've got my daily Spam down from over 500 a day at it's peak, through 150 a day (March 2004) to a mere handful a day (July 2004), to nil. Without the filters I get about a million a month - that is a literal numbers, not a wild guess. The finger is several a minute, depending on the day on the week. The off-shoot of my manic whitelist filtering is this: despite the huge number of Trojans rolling out at present, anti-virus software aside, it is extremely unlikely I will ever get infected!
Basically, attachments and embedded code are killed at the mail server. A little beyond most of you who will be using Outlook Express, but what you can do is minimise the risk...
See my 101 guide to Blocking Spam with Outlook Express
Basically, you can use OE to move / delete all attachments and "priority" messages ~ Spammers have this insane believe that their junk is urgent, a trick applied to infects mail. Real people almost never, ever sent attachments and priority mail. If they do, just retrieve it!
In killing, or at least moving these well away, you will drastically reduce the chance of getting a virus.
Note, this will do nothing for viruses lurking in MP3's and "cracks" lurking in the likes of P2P sites KaZaa. Not for me to preach the moral of that nest of worms, eh!
Just when you thought it was safe to go in the water...
Following news of Trojans for mobile phones* and Windows Mobile is this report at VNU about a PDA virus. *(Yes, your phone can be hacked too.)
According to the report, the Trojan is thought to be the work of a Russian hacker who is trying to sell it for use by Spammers or hacking groups. It affects all versions of Pocket PC.
WinCE.Brador.a is a full-scale malicious program ready to go: unlike proof-of-concept malware, Brador has a complete set of destructive functions typical for backdoors," said Eugene Kaspersky, head of antivirus research at Kaspersky Labs, in a statement.
F-Secure's virus weblog ~ kept up to date. Interesting and valuable resource.
