Top Five Ways To Infect Your Computer
If you were hoping that this post was intended to teach people how to infect their computers, you may be disappointed. That’s completely illogical and I just don’t “do” illogical, very well. However, logic does tell us that the best way to prevent your computer from becoming infected is to know how or why it happens. Agreed? Agreed.
Many of my customers tell me they have no idea how their computer became infected. “I can’t imagine how it got infected. I only use my computer for email and games.” Really? Well, there are two reasons, right there. The sad thing is that, if you really want to keep your computer free of virus and spyware infections, the only guaranteed way to do that is to shut it down. Hmm…not much joy in that.
The good news is that there are a number of steps you can take, in order to keep your computer running smoothly and to avoid some of the nastiest infections.
1. Email
One of the best ways to infect your computer is to download email attachments from people you don’t know. This is especially true if you’re using an email client which resides on your local machine (Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail…), rather than a web-based email client, like Gmail or Yahoo! Mail.
2. The Dreaded “Free Lunch”
Most adults know that nothing is free. Everything has a cost, somewhere along the way. The only question is who’ll be paying the bill and how the bill will be paid. There are many “free” computer products available on the internet, including games, security programs, productivity tools and many others. Do you really think these (for-profit) companies are losing sleep thinking about which products they can create, just so they can give them to you for free? Most of these “free” computer products are paid for by creating and utilizing additional advertising streams. You install a program, it changes your default search page, then you’re “redirected” to the products that “they” want you to see (they make money on these products). This is why browser hijacking is such a prevalent symptom of a computer infection. Follow the money.
3. Games and Gambling
There are very few infected computers that haven’t seen their share of games or some type of casino action. Again, most of these are provided “free” of charge. Now, people who play these games are not at fault for simply playing. However, they can be faulted for choosing their favorite game or casino website over their computers’ security. It happens all the time. It’s how I stay in business!
4. Missing, Outdated or Ineffective Security Software
Most computer users know the importance of keeping their antivirus, antispyware and firewall software installed and up-to-date.
Also, know which security programs your computer uses. Write it down. This way, when you get a popup from an unknown product like “Win Antivirus 2010″ (one of the many made-up names of rogue security products), saying that your computer is infected and you need to buy “XXXXX software” in order to clean it, you’ll know not to do that.
5. Inattention or Indifference
It’s OK if you aren’t “computer literate”, but it isn’t OK to have a computer and not know or care about what gets put on it or who uses it.
When you’re installing a program, do you read the EULA (End User License Agreement)? Do you blindly click OK, INSTALL, NEXT or CONTINUE, just to get the program installed quicker? This is one of the reasons that people “have no idea how their computer got infected”. RTFS (Read The …Funny… Screen).
Know who uses your computer and what they’re doing with it. This is self-explanatory, but some people still allow “guests” to use their computers without knowing what they’re installing (or blocking them from installing anything). Set up a limited Guest account, to significantly reduce the possibility that they’ll infect your computer.
I hope this article sparks an interest in reevaluating your current computer security habits. Please share this article with your friends and family. You can also sign up to receive free articles (once or twice per month), like this and others, on our APC News subscription page.
3 Responses to “Top Five Ways To Infect Your Computer”
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Actually, I was kind of disappointed. It is not necessarily illogical to intentionally infect a computer. I spend much of my time killing viruses but one great way to learn new techniques to infect a virtual (destructible) machine and have at it. I kinda hoped to find some sort of repository where I could infect a virtual machine with different types of virus for the sake of practice.
Personally I wouldn’t consider email attachments the #1 way to infect a pc. I’d be more inclined to go with end users using an old version of IE, visiting social networking websites, then installing fake codecs or getting exploited thru banners and code. Outdated AV engines are also common in the field.
Anyhow, you’re better off not downloading attachments at all. Trust no one. If you choose to download them anyhow save the file(s) to a folder on your hard drive, or possibly removable media, and scan it with one or more anti-malware utilities (virustotal and virscan come to mind). Even then depending on the type of threat it may go undetected if it’s a zero-day exploit, or maybe your security software deems it to be clean and it’s not. It’s also worth noting that people you DO know can and do get infected with malware. There’s always a chance that they’ll send out infected attachments unknowingly. Keep in mind that email attachments will still be saved or opened in the same manner regardless if you’re using webmail or an email client.
Thanks for the great info, SuperTech.