A trojan is another form of malware that ups the ante just a little. Trojans are named after the Trojan horse used in the famous battle recorded in the Illiad of Homer. That was where the army made a giant wooden horse and pushed it up to the gates of the city. The army hid inside the horse. The unsuspecting residents believed that their enemy had left and had given them a great gift. After the army was safe inside the city after dark, they opened up the horse and conquered the city.

In computer talk, a trojan comes into your computer with a picture, video, or other file that appears to be harmless. The virus code is embedded within the file. Once inside your computer, it will often reproduce itself and attach to the files that drive your operating system. From this point, it will gain either partial or total control of your computer. Some trojans are able to get into your boot sector on your hard drive.

What happens from here depends on the trojan. Most of the time, it just wants to keep you from accessing anti-virus software or sites that will tell you how to kill it. Trojans will usually force your internet browser to go to the same sites over and over. Many times these are pornographic sites.

Worms are frequently designed to make your system crash when you try to sign onto the internet or do other tasks that they are designed to monitor. The Sasser worm from a few years ago would put a flag up on your screen that counted down how long you had until your system crashed. Repairing it required that you have the fix ready to go. When the worm started its work, you had 60 seconds to stop it. Once stopped, you could take your time running the patch to fix it.

Spyware is a type of virus that likes to hide in your computer and report back to some other system about your activity. While these can be trojans, often they never make it too far out of your temporary internet files unless you download executable programs from an unknown source. Most decent anti-spyware programs are free on the internet and do a good job of cleaning up your system if you run them regularly.

While malware takes many forms, it all tries to do the same thing. It will take over some aspect of your computer to serve its own purpose. The best defenses against it is to keep up-to-date anti-virus and spyware programs and keep a good firewall installed and running.

Scan your computer frequently for malware. A good rule of thumb is to scan your computer about twice per week. Do this more if you are doing heavy amounts of searching and downloading from unknown sites. You can do it less it when your internet use is light.

bacre is a new weapon to fight against the informatic plague that the viruses are. It protects your pc against viruses, trojans and bugs.

Active Virus Shield 6.0.0.308

Active Virus Shield is a free system, supported by AOL and based in the powerful antivirus engine of Kaspersky Labs. It is so simple that you can install, config and start using it in minutes.

AntiPharming 1.30

This application was created in order to prevent "Pharming". You can install it in your PC and it will check the websites that you visit and protect your PC against this recent-created activity.

Avast Home 4.8

Avast Home is a powerful, functional and well-known antivirus. It can detect a large list of viruses, trojans, bugs, rootkits and spywares. It also checks your PC with great efficiency, cleaning it in real time.

AVG Free Edition 8.0

Grisoft has recently created the new 8.0 AVG. This corporation says that this version has a lot of facilities and is much better than previous editions. Some of the innovations are a LinkScanner and a WebShield module.

Comodo AntiVirus 2.0 Beta

Altough this antivirus is free, it has a lot of advantages and good options. You can make 3 kinds of analysis: Fasts, Generals or periodics. It has automatic actualizations and support for e-mail analysis.

NOD32 Anti-Virus System

This is, perhaps, the best antivirus in the market, and you can get it for free here. It is one of the fastest and powerful antivirus. It also has automatic actualizations and it works in all versions of MS Windows.

Norton Antivirus 2008

Norton Internet Security is a complete set of security tools for your computer. You will have a full FireWall, internet privacity, e-mail scan, and many other useful applications. It is also one of the most known antivirus.

TrojanHunter 4.7

As its name says, it will defend your computer from Trojans. TrojanHunter checks the Registry files, memory and disk drives, to detect any trace of Trojan, including new Trojans.

Windows Defender 1593

Windows Defender is an utility with which you can easily remove spyware that have infiltrated your PC, while you are protected so that they do not 'enter' more, as do the antivirus software with viruses.

This is by far the best advice any security expert can give you. No anti-malware device can offer 100% detection rates. You are the best anti-virus. Always understand what the motive behind advertising free software is: it can be either to advertise a paid version of the product or such, or it can be spyware (serve ads on your PC as means of financing the author). Be wary of free smiley packs, toolbars, antispyware products, etc.

• Understand the EULA - Let's admit it, most of us skip the EULA (license agreement). After all, there can't be malware there. Well, you'll be surprised. Many malware vendors choose to spread their programs using "legitimate" methods, so as to avoid legal trouble - e.g, there is an ad on a certain site, your attention gets caught by the ad - you download the software and install it right away without going over the EULA, only to discover that there are ads popping up on your desktop, and no, they can't be removed through Add/Remove programs. That was written in the EULA… EULAlyzer will help you with this by analyzing key phrases and sentences that talk about possible advertising, limiting of rights, privacy violations and more. It will point you out suspicious sentences, and there's not need to read the EULA itself. EULAlyzer by JavaCool software (Freeware)
• Always GOOGLE before downloading - There is a lot of malware out there, concealing in legitimate software. So, before you download any kind of software: Google it. If the software is legit, there shouldn't be any mention of it on security forums and anti-virus vendors. If there is, don't download and/or install it.
• Watch what you download - Many people download cracks to bypass protection in software and games, and make it "work" as if it were legit. Besides the legal factor, by far this is the most common method of infection. Especially beware of files called crack.exe, keygen.exe, serial.exe and such. Watch what files you download through P2P (Peer To Peer) software.
  • Free antivirus - There are several free solutions on the market. They all are good anti-viruses. Avast! 4 Home Edition (requires free license registration), Avira Anti-Vir Personal , AVG8 Free. Occasionally, you may also want to scan your computer to get a second opinion, using an online scanner that won't interfere with the local anti-virus software, such as Kaspersky Online Scanner.
  • Free anti-spyware - MalwareBytes Anti Malware (MBAM): combines real-time monitoring with excellent detection and removal rates.
  • Free firewall - Comobo Free Firewall: provides excellent protection and is also light on the system. ZoneAlarm Firewall: offers good protection with a large set of tools, but is heavier on the system.

The Holy 3

In this case, the more is NOT the better. If you install multiple anti-virus programs and firewalls, you are guaranteed to get sluggish performance, false positives and lesser detection rates, since each anti-virus program will conflict with the other. Same for the firewall, but not for anti-spyware software - it's OK to install more than one anti-spyware product, but I recommend staying with one. Never download unfamiliar anti-spyware, firewalls or anti-virus software, and if you do - Google it first and find reviews of it. Many of these are considered rogue, and once installed - will detect false positives and nag you to purchase the software using annoying popups.

When Unsure - Scan

If you have downloaded a file, and you suspect it - don't open it. If not triggered by another process or user input, downloaded files will usually remain inactive. Scanning it with your local anti-virus will not give you definite results, and you should scan the file with an online scanner, which uses tens of virus scanners to check the file for known infections (and unknown ones, using heuristics). Two such websites are Jotti s Online Malware Scan and VirusTotal. While nothing can guarantee the safety of a file, scanning the file with one of these online facilities gets close.

If All Hell Breaks Loose - Ask The Experts

There are a lot of volunteer websites online that will help you to remove malware online (even tough ones!) using community-developed tools that are not commercially available or automated, for free. The help is professional and friendly, but remember that the helper's response can take time, depending on the helper's and website's workload. GeeksToGo, BleepingComputer are two such boards which I personally like. There are a lot of others. Be sure only to post in one board, so as not to waste multiple helpers' time. You can find more links to such websites here,

You might have seen VirusTotal in the American edition of PC World Magazine s 100 Best Products of 2007. For those of you that didn't, Virus Total will scan the file you uploaded with 33 different virus scanners updated every few hours including AVG, avast! and McAfee. VirusTotal has no upload limit, but don't be surprised when a 200mb file takes half an hour to upload.

Jotti's Malware Scan

Jotti's Malware Scan is similar to VirusTotal, but it only has 20 virus scanners. But because of this Jotti's Malware Scan will be a little faster. However, the Malware Scan only accepts files less than 10 mb.

VirSCAN

This multi-engine scanner has three more scanners than VirusTotal, but it seems to take twice as long as VirusTotal and Jotti's Malware Scan. Not only that but it only has a 10mb upload limit. One feature that might be useful to some users is the ability to see how harmful or harmless an infected file may be (I personally get rid of an infected file if I see one).

That concludes this article, but remember that none of these scanners replaces a good antivirus client that is actually installed on your system. You can get some good free ones pretty easily here and here.

Norton Anti-Virus. This antivirus is good in the fact that it does the job and u won't have anything go undetected as such. There is a few downsides to this program, 1 its cost yearly, and 2 it slows down the computer dramatically. There is a free trial that goes for about a month but it doesn't allow u to do much. This program also comes in the form of toolbar in your internet browser. Norton is the basic program, which new computers usually comes with a trial version or top dollar computers will have full version for say a year, on most windows computers.

AVG anti-virus, spyware, root kit. This program has a free edition anti-virus and root kit which last forever. AVG anti-virus updates regularly, usually each day with new protection against new viruses. There is also a virus dictionary included in the program which has all information on the virus. The program also keeps the infected files in a vault for future reference. You can clean out this vault. AVG also gives you as soon as it finds a problem, to be able to heal, move to vault and cancel options for fast and effective solutions. AVG also has a root kit to download, which goes deep into the computers and gets anything undetected by anti-virus, or in other words files that seemed safe to the anti-virus which in fact isn't. Also looks through the hidden files. Spyware is not free but when you have this program it blocks off spyware before they hit your computer. Even if the file has been there, it will detect it. There is a buy version of the anti-virus which has lots more features. I do believe AVG
Does a great job, and is ideal for people who want easy to use and understanding anti virus, free version that does a great job, and updates regularly. AVG is very popular amongst computer shops, and repair it places.

SpyBot, Spybot is a good user friendly spyware software available for free. This program lets u know of anything that's about to change and give u the option the block it, or ignore it. This program has a downside and it can think your firewall is a spyware, and can turn it off, but if such a thing happens just uninstall it and install it again. Also make sure your firewall is turned on. If not, turn it on and accept the change when it pops up. One really annoying thing, even though it does a great job, I remember once I had a key logger nothing could find but this did, it just in the way and does slow down the computer a little. The pop up things don't disappear for a while, even though you clicked it so you will have to be patient with this one..

Windows Live One Care. A necessity when using MSN and HOTMAIL. this searches/scans incoming files from emails or msn messenger. This is to ensure optimal safety from people when they send u things. Although you can't use anything else, what u can do when using MSN messenger is disable the virus check when receiving files from other contact members and scan with another virus protection e.g. AVG. this takes no time at all. Usually it takes a very long time. First it logs onto their website and checks which is a slow process. When hotmail uses it, it's mainly for checking the files you updated but if u get sent one, it gives you a notice to say it may have a virus, giving you the option to scan.

Google, Yahoo, and other toolbars. Toolbars are most essential when coming to pop ups. this happens when surfing the net and a pop up comes, its blocks the pop up, meaning no viruses from pop ups. Also it protects u from other viruses from the sites as you browse them. You can also turn bits off and on to how it suits you. There is also a downside to toolbars. One thing is they take up so much room at some points half your view area is taken up. So why use them if u can't see what you looking up. Personally I would just leave the normal antivirus do the job. Yes they are good to the point that they are programmed differently from other anti viruses and may see the viruses other virus protections might not see. It may be in their programming to have different definitions to what a virus is. They can pick up things some other things can't.

Well I do hope this info did help you out. I have shown you how 3 different viruses are different and their good and bad points. Shown some toolbar virus protectors. Spyware is a big factor that needs to be seen into. Spyware includes key logging, which is when implanted into your computer; people can see everything you type, meaning your usernames and passwords on the site you visit, credit card details. All viruses are different so try to find one that fits for you and always, always get to know the virus protection you use, very well.

But what is malware? Essentially is ANY software that has been explicitly designed to get in to, damage or destroy a computer system. The word comes - like many computer terms - from two separate words that have been joined together. In this case it is “malicious” and “software”. If you look up the word malicious in a thesaurus you will find it means “hateful, spiteful, wicked, cruel and bad”. In fact, malware is often called badware as well, so if you hear that term you will know what it means! The legal term for malware (mostly used in the US) is “computer contaminant”).

Malware comes in all shapes and sizes and is considered so because of the intent of its creator.

A worm can be counted as malware. This is different from a virus because it does not have to attach itself to anything - either a file or a programme. It then replicates itself across a system and cause harm - if only because it takes up all the space (or bandwidth). A virus on the other hand generally tends to change or corrupt files you may have on your system. One of the most famous was the Mydoom worm which sent junk mail out to infected systems. Although the author was never found most people thought that it started out as an action against one company - SCO - but since then it has been attributed to online crime gangs rather than someone with a grudge against one company.

Worms can sometimes be created with good intentions! For example, the Nachi worm, was an attempt to download patches from Microsoft to fix vulnerable elements in systems. However, it did create a lot of traffic on networks and was know - and hated for - rebooting machines and trying to fix things without asking the permission of the computer owner or user first!

A Trojan is also something to watch out for! This is a piece of software which looks as if it does on certain thing but in fact does something else entirely. Its hidden element may well be a computer virus. For example, you may see a great screensaver (free! Yippee!) on the internet. When you run it, the screensaver may well then unload hidden viruses. One sub form of a Trojan is the Remote Access Trojan (or RAT for short) which allows its creator to access your system from their own. Then, they can do anything they want!

You may well have discovered at one point that you have sent an email to all the people in your address book - and have received lots of angry emails back. But you can't remember sending the email! This is because your computer may have been turned in to a ZOMBIE! A zombie computer often sends spam email out and this is done because your system has been infiltrated by a Trojan.

A rootkit is another piece of malware you should be on the lookout for! This is a program created to take control of your system (root is an old Unix term - we would say “Administrator”). So, if your system is compromised by a rootkit, this means that users who have not been authorized will be able to use your system as administrators.

Spyware is similar to rootkit in as much as it can take partial control of a computer without the user knowing or consenting. The name suggests that it is used simply to monitor what you do but it can go far deeper than that, Spyware can access and collect all your personal information. If you have ever had your home page changed without you doing it, then it is more than likely you have some spysware on your computer. Spyware is not a worm or a virus - at the very least because it does NOT tend to replicate itself. Rather than modifying or deleting your files, spyware is designed specifically to exploit your computer for financial gain. This can be from stealing your card numbers, delivering pop-up adverts that you didn't request.

And finally, please do not think that your Instant Messaging service is immune to malware! As internet based Instant Messaging becomes m ore and more popular, the malware guys will turn their attention to this. The Web 2 generation regularly use features on IM such as file transference and webcams which make their system prone to attack…. 2008 may be the year of the “IM Attack!”

How to avoid malware? Protect your computer properly!

Many people say its Kaspersky, others say its NOD32 and someone thinks it's Norton or Panda. And they always try to prove it!

Well, people choose anti-virus which they like and which is best for them. I use Avast Home Edition, because it doesn't slow my PC very much. When I'm doing full system scan I install Kaspersky because this anti-virus is the best fighter against viruses for me. I don't use it all the time because it slows my computer too much.

How anti-viruses slow down the computer

2.2 GB data was transferred from one disk into other without installed anti-virus. Transfer took 6 min. 04 s. Later transfer was made with anti-viruses installed. Transfer was longer:

• Avast Home Edition - 29 s.
• AVG Free Edition 7.5 - 51 s.
• Panda Antivirus 2007 - 1 min. 6 s.
• NOD32 - 1 min. 21 s.
• Antivir Personal Premium - 1 min. 58 s.
• Antivir Personal Classic - 2 min. 29 s.
• Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6.0 - 2 min. 44 s.
• AVG Pro Edition 7.5 - 3 min. 9 s.
• Norton Antivirus 2007 - 3 min. 50 s.
• Bitdefender v10 - 6 min. 18 s.
• Bitdefender 8 Free Edition - 6 min. 18 s.
• F-Secure Antivirus 2007 - 18 min.

Virus Database

For an anti-virus is very important to detect new viruses, that's why they always update their virus database. How long it took to find out about a new virus?

• Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6.0 - 28 min.
• F-Secure Antivirus 2007 - 2 h. 55 min.
• Bitdefender v10 - 2 h. 59 s.
• Bitdefender 8 Free Edition - 2 h. 59 s.
• Antivir Personal Premium - 3 h. 15 min.
• Antivir Personal Classic - 3 h. 15 min.
• NOD32 - 4 h. 46 min.
• Panda Antivirus 2007 - 6 h. 34 min.
• Avast Home Edition - 7 h. 31 min.
• AVG Pro Edition 7.5 - 8 h. 46 min.
• AVG Free Edition 7.5 - 8 h. 46 min.
• Norton Antivirus 2007 - 12 h. 41 min.

Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6.0

“Kaspersky” is one of the best anti-viruses around. It detects all most popular and most rare viruses. It also doesn't damage any “Office” documents. But on the other hand, this anti-virus is bad against spyware. It detects only about 75% of them.

Note: Kaspersky 7 will come out soon. It will be much better than Kaspersky 6. You can already try out beta version.

F-Secure Anti-Virus 2007

All viruses, Trojan Horses and “rootkits” were unable to hide from this anti-virus. But F-Secure still can't detect all spyware. It also needs about 150 MB free space. It is too much for an anti-virus.

Antivir Personal Premium 7.0

This is one of the best anti-viruses against spyware, Trojans and other viruses. It also has a very important function - auto e-mail scan. But on the other hand, it can't find all “rootkits”.

Bitdefender v10

“Bitdefender” offers good protection against viruses and scan's computer more carefully than other anti-viruses, that's why “Bitdefender's” full system scan is slow. It detects spyware perfectly, but viruses can turn off or even damage this anti-virus.

Antivir Personal Classic 7.0

This is definitely the best free anti-virus. It finds more viruses than other free anti-viruses. It is also easy to use this program, but if you have this anti-virus, get an anti-spyware. “Antivir Personal Classic 7.0” can't find them all. Only about 16% of them detected.

Panda Antivirus 2007

“Panda Antivirus 2007” is one of the best against most popular viruses, but if our computer will be attacked by a rare virus, we won't get all the help. It isn't good against “rootkits” or Trojans too. But “Panda” doesn't need much time to perform full system scan.

Norton Antivirus 2007

Long ago this was one of the best anti-viruses, but now, it is one of the worst. That's because “Norton” find's out about a new virus only after about 13 h. That is very bad indeed. It also needs 200 MB free space! Well, at least we won't see spyware in our PC.

Note: If you have a Chinese version of “Norton Anti-Virus”, GET RID OF IT! There was a bug found, which deletes some very important “Windows” files.

Avast 4.7 Home Edition

Avast isn't introduced to many Trojans or “rootkits”. Some viruses can turn off this anti-virus. So if you want to have a good and free anti-virus, get Avira Personal Classic. Well, at least Avast doesn't slow down PC too much.

AVG Pro Edition 7.5

Most popular viruses won't stand a chance, but Trojans or “rootkits” have a chance. A very bad thing is that AVG doesn't protect “Outlook Express” or “Tunderbird” e-mail.

AVG Free Edition 7.5

Free AVG version can kill popular viruses, but many of “backdoor” viruses and Trojan Horses weren't stopped. AVG Free isn't good against spyware (unlike the commercial version) and has detected about 12% of all “rootkits”.

NOD32

Popular viruses were destroyed (all were detected), but rare have successfully harmed our PC (only about 85% detected). “NOD32” didn't detect viruses, which were in a CD/DVD or USB flash drive.

Bitdefender 8 Free Edition

Don't ever install this anti-virus in your PC! It has detected only 50% of the most popular viruses! Rare ones and “backdoor” viruses didn't have a chance though. If you are using “Internet Explorer”, Bitdefender 8 Free will protect it perfectly.