Getting infected by malware is not difficult today. There are tons of places where malware are hosted and easily infect a machine if you are not careful.
Sometimes, your computer’s life can still be save with a little help of antivirus and firewall but not always you are so lucky because not all antivirus block every piece of malware on the internet.
As a result, it is all up to you whether you want to stay away from malware infection or not.
Here are 5 highly targeted areas to start a malware infection:
1. Emails
Receiving email from anonymous or even friends who already had their email account compromised is pretty dangerous. Especially from your friends because you normally will already have 90% trusts on them to click on basically everything. Getting a Malware infection from a trusted friend is one of the areas that you want to be particularly careful.
2. Download freeware from Websites
Sometimes, downloading freeware is one of the methods to get an infection. Particularly downloading an executable file, once you do a double click and if the software appears to be malicious, you might start to see things which you usually don’t see. The tip here is, read a lot of review before downloading a freeware. Ensure that the freeware is not some malicious software.
3. Downloading pirated materials
Some genuine software or product can be very expensive and usually people will seek for ways to crack the software. Unfortunately, in the process of cracking the software, there is no one can guarantee that your computer is malware-free. Those software crackers might have already install some spyware as you crack the software with their cracking tool. To solve this, don’t use pirated stuff. Look for alternative such as open source software.
4. USB flash drive
Do you know that malware spread from USB flash drive is pretty fast? If one flash drive is infected, there could be tens of computer out there is infected simply because the flash drive is used everywhere. As a result, scan your own USB flash drive frequently. As for the rest who use other people’s USB flash drive, scan their device. If that is an urgent situation, copy the folder to your computer and immediately do a scan.
5. Social Network
Among all of the above, the place that easily spread malware is the social network such as Facebook. Twitter, LinkedIn and many more. Looking at the statistic that all the high traffic sites are social network site after Google search engine and hackers today love to spread fake breaking news using the social network by inserting a malicious URL into the direct message. To stay away from this, use a URL scanner to scan the link before clicking.
Guest article written by: Alan Tay is the author who runs IT Security Column, a Security blog where he mostly writes about tips on how to deal with different types of malware.
Social Networking sites are certainly the top targets where such infections can spread like viral. And we all keep hearing about new type of technique to spread viruses on your system through social networking sites.
Seems like we can no longer trust anything these days! I’ve received some highly suspicious emails lately from “friends”. A phone call to those friends confirmed that those emails were not sent by them. Luckily I didn’t click on any of them and they ended up being tossed!
Good tip. Just remember what is popular will get cyber criminals attention so be very careful where you click and what you type, because there is always a possibility to get infected
My computer was infected from malware none of the anti virus was able to remove that finally I installed kaspersky 2012 and it run perfectly.