Tuesday, October 28, 2008

How to Detect Computer Malware Programs


Malware ProgramsThe Internet is now considered as the place to find everything and anything you can think of. While this has made communications and business a whole lot easier, the difficulty of regulating the content over the Internet has allowed many different forms of computer malware programs to infect hundreds of thousands of computers in different parts of the world.

Computer Malware Programs

What is a computer malware?
Short for “malicious software,” a computer malware is any computer program that has been created to cause damage to a computer’s hard drive and perform various operation that were otherwise not permitted by the computer’s user.

There are a number of different types of malware that can be found over the Internet, each with their own method of causing some form of damage to your computer’s hard drive. The two most common types of malware are:

Virus - The most popular kind of computer malware, a computer virus is the most destructive of all the different kinds of malware. The destruction ranges from deleting files in your computer to causing your entire computer to just simply crash.

Spyware - Computer spyware does not do any damage on your computer. Instead, the damage is dealt on the user. Through the use of computer spyware, its developer will be able to gain access to any stored information in your computer hard drive such as your credit card information and passwords and use these without the owner of the computer even knowing.

Detecting and Removing Malware
Because your computer can now easily be invaded by simply going online and surfing the Internet, it is now extremely important to make sure that you and your computer are protected from the different kinds of malware. Here are a few suggestions to help you be able to effectively detect and remove malware in your computer as well as how to protect yourself from this.

Malware Data Safe ProgramsRun your anti-virus software program regularly
Anti-virus software programs would not only need to run on a regular basis to ensure that no type of malware is able to invade your computer. This would also need to be regularly updated to ensure that its database is current with information on the newest kinds of malware discovered. Because anti-virus software programs are only able to detect different kinds of malware based on the information that is stored in its database, the failure of this to be updated may cause newer kinds of malware to get into your computer.

Get a separate spyware detector
There are a number of free anti-spyware programs that could be easily downloaded from the Internet free of charge. These programs have been developed for the sole purpose of detecting spyware and adware programs which are commonly not recognized by most anti-virus software programs.

No comments: