Have you ever heard the word which is called Malware? Actually, I did not what it is before I learned about it in F.A.L.O section, so I’m gonna explain about it.

What is Malware?

 Malware (a contraction of “malicious software”) refers to software developed for the purpose of doing harm.

Malware can be classified based on how they get executed, how they spread, and/or what they do. The classification is not perfect, however, in the sense that the groups often overlap and the difference is often not obvious, giving rise to frequent flame wars.

The first form of malware to evolve was the computer virus. Viruses work and spread (within the infected system) by attaching themselves to other pieces of software (or in the case of macro viruses, documents), such that during the execution of the program the viral code is executed. Viruses spread across computers when the software or document they attached themselves to is transferred from one computer to the other.

Computer worms are similar to viruses but are stand-alone software and thus do not require other pieces of software to attach themselves to. They do modify their host operating system, however, at least to the extent that they are started as part of the boot process. To spread, worms either exploit some vulnerability of the target system or use some kind of social engineering to trick users into executing them.

How to remove Malware

How to manually remove the spyware differs depending on what malware you have been infected with. Usually you can run a scan with whatever anti-malware program you have. Be careful with which malware program you get though, a lot of them won’t always catch or remove the malware. Once you have identified the infection, you can manually go into your computer to get rid of all the malware throughout the computer by deleting the infected .exes, cleaning up the registry, removing the infected files from the startup and whatever else your scan results show.

How to protect your computer from Malware

 How can we help to prevent this from infecting our own computers? There are several ways of pretecting your computer from computer virus.

• Use a good AntiVirus program. There are several free versions that work well, like AVG. Microsoft Security Essentials which is also free has had good reviews.
• Keep your OS and AV updated. Millions of rogue software and security holes in the operating system are being discovered. To help protect them the OS and antivirus manufacturer release updates for their products frequently. Make sure that you install those important updates. An out of date antivirus program does not help in detecting new infections.
• Install an AntiSpyware app to scan your system periodically. MalwareBytes Anti-Malware Free Version and/or SuperAntispyware Free Edition are good choices. You can run these manually every week or whenever you think you may be infected. This is used along side of an anitvirus program because no A/V program can detect all Malware.

image: computer virus by talksrealfast –cclicensed via flickr