Notes on Common Malicious Program/s

     In my years of experience in the events industry, I’ve already encountered lots of pc/laptop/usb_device problems with regards to malicious programs. It’s like having a bad event if there’s no one who would come to me and ask if I can remove malicious programs in their laptops, usb etc. For me, I can really say that “It’s all just part of the script”. Anyway, in this post and the other upcoming post I’ll try to give my points and views on : (if infected) how to remove it, (not yet infected) how to prevent it. Since most of my encounter with these situations are offline and with Windows XP+, then I can say that my tips works 99% all the time. The most common malicious program tackled here are “password_viewer.exe, autorun.inf, bar311.exe and the likes”. The actual removal will be in another topic to minimize contents here.

     To give you a brief explanation on a virus, worm and trojan (or VWT). VWT have one thing in common, and that is, they can be harmful and annoying all the time. VWT’s differ on the manner on how they infect into the system. A virus transmit itself through a medium, a human to be exact. So it’s safe to say, computer virus is similar alike a human virus. However, a worm can infect and spread itself without any human support, it spreads itself by using tunnels used by your system the same way it does in sending communications through the networks. A trojan uses a different approach, it is based on the famous “trojan horse” left by the Greeks outside Troy during the Trojan War. It is a program that appears desirable but actually contains something harmful, a virus or even a worm.

     Now that I’ve given the simplest explanation I can come up with, here are simple tips on how you can prevent your system from being infected by any of the malicious programs:

• Do arm your system with a complete and effective antivirus and firewall. I suggest either AVG from Grisoft or NOD32 from ESET for your antivirus. For firewall, I suggest Comodo Firewall from Comodo or Zone Alarm from ZoneLabs.
• Once you have chosen on which software to use, be sure to update it regulary and to do full system scans once in a while.
• VWT’s commonly transfer during USB devices connection. eg, flash drive, external disk, etc. This can be avoided by turning-off the Autoplay function of the USB drive in your system.

     That’s it for now. Im still making a draft for the step-by-step removal procedure probably on the next post. As a final word, no matter how secure you think your system is, think again, there’s always a newer threat that is waiting to slip pass your guard.

“What YOU do matters!”