Have you ever experienced slow PC or frequent computer crashes? Faced interruptions with pop-ups and spam? Or have experienced mysterious changes to homepage settings and have received doubtful search results? If Yes, then your PC could be infected with malware.
With the immense growth in technological development, sophisticated malware operate without alerting you to their presence. As malware is becoming even more discreet, your computer could be infected and you may not even know it. Malware can be accidentally downloaded to your system from various programs files, Internet, or email attachments. They can also enter your PC via security holes in your operating system.
Malware writers and attackers use sophisticated techniques to spread their malicious programs. They depend on social networking, P2P downloads, USB infections in order to infect computers. Moreover spam emails are used by attackers, influencing user to open the email and click on links within it. Attackers have also been known to spread the threat in a drive-by downloads.
Although hackers target Windows operating system the most, Macintosh and Linux computers can still be vulnerable. Apparently, in a Microsoft report about malware infection rates on Windows PCs, the worldwide average malware encounter rate for 4th quarter of 2013 was 21.58 percent, with the country of Pakistan on top with 60.11 percent. In the same period, 49.92 percent of Windows PCs in India encountered malware. That is, almost half of the Indian population using Windows PCs has encountered malware. Most of these encounters are from systems running Microsoft Security Essentials or Windows Defender (on Windows 8).
Microsoft says that the Rotbrow Trojan family was a major threat. Rotbrow is a type of cyber infection which is of extremely destructive nature. It has a capability to make a chaos like condition inside your system. It enters a system through email attachments, P2P files transfer, infected websites, removal drives and social engineering. Researchers have observed Rotbrow installing browser add-ons and other malware as well. Hence, protection from such encounter is certainly required.
However, not every encounter results in an infection. Efforts by malware to infect a computer system can be blocked by a number of security protection layers. Few are listed below:
- Update your system with the latest antivirus software such as eScan that protects your system from all kinds of malware attacks.
- Enable firewall in your PC to ensure you are secure on local networks and the Internet.
- Keep all of the software installed on your computer up-to-date. Especially software from Microsoft, Adobe, Oracle Java, and others.
- Before downloading any program or software do through research about the reputability of the company that is selling the program or software.
- Think before opening an email attachment sent from an unknown sender, open it only if you are positive about the source.
- Avoid clicking on any pop-up that appears, especially pop-ups which are displayed on an unknown website.
- Keep your computer’s security settings to a higher level. Configure your computer’s AV settings to perform automatic system updates.
The best way to know whether your PC has a malware infection is to run a free scan. Use the Free eScan tool kit from here. No installation required. https://www.escanav.com/english/content/products/MWAV/escan_mwav.asp
