One of the difficult aspects of owning a computer is having to deal with malicious software which may try to extort money from you, spy on you, track what you are doing on your computer, or bring up nuisance programs to annoy you. In the past, when I was a consulting network engineer at a large bank, I saw some nasty viruses. One I recall caused email storms that brought the bank’s entire email system to its knees. It infected computers by sending emails from the infected computer to all of the email addresses in the computer, along with a copy of the virus! It just replicated itself over and over until virtually every computer in the bank was infected. It took days to remedy the problem. The real issue here was: the group who took care of the email servers were lax in updating them with the latest antivirus updates. The computer virus that caused the email storm was a known problem, and there was a fix for it. It had not been installed. Keep your computer up to date.

There was also the occasional virus that destroyed the all the information on the infected computer. That required a complete restore. I haven’t seen that kind of virus for a long time. Today, many of the computer viruses come from third world countries which have few laws against spyware, malware, or ransomware. In fact, if you read the news, some countries actively engage in spyware. There are many countries that actively spy on each other, including ours. Much of the malicious software today is in one of the following categories:

Spyware

Spyware is very pervasive, from industrial espionage, looking to steal corporate secrets, to governments spying on each other, to people trying to get your bank account passwords and information. You must employ some kind of antispyware or antivirus software, or both, in all of your computers, and be on guard all the time. There are many programs to choose from, some are free, some cost money. Microsoft has a free program called Defender, built into Windows, and is updated regularly. Avast and Bitdefender are popular and have free versions. Companies like Norton and McAfee have been around for a long time and offer extensive protection.

Malware

One malware program seems to pop up occasionally and presents itself on a web page you just opened up. It’s in the category of a nuisance. It has a red flashing button on the screen that says it has just taken over your computer. You cannot do any of the normal things to get out of it, like close the page or shut the browser down.

Here is what to do:

• Press the CTL, ALT, DEL buttons simultaneously, just like you used to do to boot DOS, in the old days.
• This will bring up a system page with several choices.
• Click on the Task Manager.
• Find the task you are running under the APP’s at the top, and click to highlight the task (Your browser) you wish to stop running.
• Then click on End Task in the lower right corner.
• After this, to be safe, reboot your PC and manually run your antivirus program to scan your computer. Then you should be ready to resume your activities.

Ransomware

Ransomware is nasty. It is extortion. I personally know of someone who was a victim. It took over his computer and demanded payment for a code to recover the computer. This activity usually originates from programmers in a third world country, where laws against this kind of thing are either non-existent, or rarely enforced. There are only two choices here: either you must pay them, (usually in bitcoin) or rebuild your computer, hopefully from your backup. You do have a backup, don’t you? Be very careful where you browse; it’s a dangerous world out there. Look carefully at the entire URL (http://www.———.xxx) – not the just name of a website you are going to visit. One letter or number in a URL can make all the difference. Be especially of websites with URL’s from third world countries. Never click on anything inside an email you are not expecting. Better to contact the person directly and ask if they sent the email. Look at URL’s carefully! When I worked for a bank, I once stumbled upon a website that duplicated our bank’s website home page. It looked exactly like our website. The URL was close to the bank’s, but not exactly the same. I ran traceroutes and found the site was located in Indonesia, using a block of IP addresses that had not been assigned yet. They disappeared after a couple of days. It’s a dangerous world out there! Always Be Careful!

Scams

Recently my wife received a email from Amazon indicating the $5,000.00 computer she ordered was going to be broken into two orders. If she had any questions about the order, there was a phone number to call. Several problems here:

• She had not ordered a computer.
• The phone number was not a 800 type number.
• The person had a slight Indian accent.
• He asked me to type a website into my browser.
• The website was: http://www.fastsupport.com

I immediately recognized the website as one which could take over your computer. Hung up phone. There are many YOUTUBE video’s on these scams.

Always run an antivirus program

You must always run some kind of antivirus protection on every computer. There are many choices available from free to expensive. Please don’t run several antivirus programs at the same time, as that will slow your computer down. The antivirus programs end up competing with each other. I once was asked to look at a slow running computer and found someone loaded three anti-virus programs on it, all running at the same time.

It is difficult for someone to say one anti-virus program is better than another. One may appear a little better in some magazine article one year and another program will be appear to be better the next year. Try one, if you don’t like it, or hear bad things about it, uninstall it and run different one. The world of antivirus programs is very competitive. For the most part, I think most of them do a decent job. No antivirus program is perfect! You always need to be careful when using a computer, even though you are running antivirus software. Remember, be vigilant, and always run an antivirus!