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Does Your PC Have Worms? |
by:
Joel Walsh |
Worms aren't just for dogs anymore. Find out how to inoculate your computer against these nasty parasites.
What Are Worms?
Worms are descended from viruses and are even nastier. Just as ever stronger doses of pesticide breed ever more resilient locusts, better and better anti-spyware software bred ever more devious viruses.
Finally, some virus designers stopped having their creations infect and take over filesway real viruses infect and take over cells. Instead, they created programs that could stand on their own and cause plenty of trouble withouthelp of any other software applications. Just worms are independent organisms that can infecthost directly, so do computer worms infect computers directly.
What Do Worms Do?
Worm designers are often even more sinister than virus designers, since worm designers are not just vandals. Worm designers often use their creations to achieve specific goals:
• Backdoor creation. Worms often try to set up another kind of malware,backdoor. A backdoor ishidden opening in your network connection that letsworm send data out and take data in. Practically speaking,data it's sending out are often spam emails, anddata it takes in are instructions on spam emails to send.
• Denial of service attack. Some worm designers really are vandals rather than profit-hungry con artists sending spam. But their vandalism can be more targeted. They use worms to send out numerous requests to remote computers, such as web servers, in order to overwhelm them and therefore shut them down. This is calleddenial of service attack.
• Spyware, Trojan, adware, and virus installation. Worms are often used simply to unleash other forms of malware oncomputer that might otherwise block them.
• Information theft and fraud.Worms can multitask in order to set up spyware that gathers sensitive information--often financial information--and then set up backdoors, Trojans, viruses, or dialers to disseminatestolen data.
How Do Worms End Up onPC?
Worms enter PCs just as viruses, spyware and other malware do: any way they can! Some favorite points of entry for worms:
• Websites can actually download software to your computer without you realizing it. This software includes not only worms, but also spyware, adware, viruses, and other malware. These malware programs find their way into websites either bydeliberate design ofsite owner or because hackers have installedsoftware onwebsite's server.
• Peer-to-peer file-sharing networkscontain many nice-enough-looking files that are really worms. One ofsneakiest disguises isfilename that indicatesspyware is reallyvideo ofbeautiful actress.
• Email,favored route of viruses, can still be exploited by Spyware. But since new email programs usually blockautomatic opening of file attachments, this is less ofproblem than it used to be.
• Any internet connection inevitably lets data flow both in and out, and so is vulnerable to attacks by worms.
How Do You Get Rid of Worms?
There's really only one good way to make sure your computer is rid of worms: scan it with multiple antivirus and anti-spyware programs usingfull-system scan. Worms are tricky, so anything less thanfull-system scan might let them escape. Worse, with new worms coming out alltime, some antivirus and anti-spyware packages may not even know aboutnew worm until after its wreaking havoc on your machine. That's why you should try using more than one antivirus program and more than one anti-spyware program to increase your odds of successfully detectingmalware.
Don't have more than one anti-spyware and antivirus software? You'd better start downloading. After all, worms will not take excuses.
Aboutauthor:
Joel Walsh writes for http://www.spyware-refuge.comabout worm removal http://www.spyware-refuge.com?spyware anti virus [Publish this article on your website! Requirement: live link for above URL/web address w/ link text/anchor text: "spyware anti virus" OR leave this bracketed message intact.]
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