Techin3D

What is computer Virus?

Computer viruses are small software programs that are designed to spread from one computer to another and to interfere with computer operation.

Through the course of using the Internet and your computer, you may have come in to contact with computer viruses. Many computer viruses are stopped before they can start, but there is still an ever growing concern as to what do computer viruses do and the list of common computer virus symptoms. A computer virus might corrupt or delete data on your computer, use your email program to spread itself to other computers, or even erase everything on your hard disk.

How do I protect my computer from viruses?

People are always searching for these following Questions

How do I protect my computer from viruses?

Is there anything free to protect my computer?

what do you do with a trojan on your computer? help with removal?

Install an antivirus program and keep it updated.

Keeping antivirus programs updated is imperative. Because new viruses are released every day, there's always some risk that your computer will be infected by a virus that your antivirus program does not "know" about. Unless a rapidly-spreading virus is released, you should be reasonably safe if you update your antivirus program weekly.

Here is the suite of protection programs I use and recommend to everyone to use as well.

Most of the software I use is for free because they are usually made by good people and work the best – and its free.

1. Spybot – Search and Destroy

This is one of 2 programs i use to prevent spyware from coming to my PC.

http://www.safer-networking.org/en/index.html

2. Adaware

http://www.lavasoftusa.com/products/ad_aware_free.phpThis and spybot always compete with eachother for best free anti-spyware. I like to have both at hand just in case.

3. Avast Anti-Virus

This wonderful program is powerful and free. It doesnt take up much of your resources on your computer at all.

http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html

Also, You must use Firefox instead of internet explorer.

www.getfirefox.comThe newer, more protected, versions of IE will eat up your resources causing it to slow down

What does anti-virus software do?

Although details may vary between packages, anti-virus software scans files or your computer's memory for certain patterns that may indicate an infection. The patterns it looks for are based on the signatures, or definitions, of known viruses. Virus authors are continually releasing new and updated viruses, so it is important that you have the latest definitions installed on your computer.Once you have installed an anti-virus package, you should scan your entire computer periodically.

Automatic scans - Depending what software you choose, you may be able to configure it to automatically scan specific files or directories and prompt you at set intervals to perform complete scans.
Manual scans - It is also a good idea to manually scan files you receive from an outside source before opening them. This includes

saving and scanning email attachments or web downloads rather than selecting the option to open them directly from the source
scanning media, including CDs and DVDs, for viruses before opening any of the files.

How Do I Know If My Computer Is Infected By A Virus?

In a perfect world, your antivirus software will warn you of an infection. However, that may not happen if you have not been downloading updates or if your antivirus software stops functioning for some reason. (For example, some viruses attack antivirus software).

There's no single symptom for virus infections. Some viruses inform you themselves by displaying messages like, "Ha, ha, you're infected by whatever." Others just usurp system and network resources to do things like send e-mail messages or propagate themselves over the network. Still others delete or corrupt critical files. If your computer starts performing differently for no apparent reason, it may be infected by a virus.

In some cases, Information Security is able to detect a virus on your computer by tracing malicious network traffic or e-mail back to your network connection. One way we use to inform you of the problem is to block your computer's access to the Internet and display a Security Warning Page whenever you attempt to access a web site.

My Computer May Be Infected With A Virus. What Should I Do About It?

Local expertise and assistance on cleaning up viruses is available at the the UTS Help Desk.

If you elect to clean up the infection yourself, the general procedure to follow is:

Update your antivirus software.
Disconnect your computer from the network to prevent it from transmitting the virus over the network while it is still infected.
Use your antivirus software to do a complete scan of all your internal disk drives and any external media such as flash memory or diskettes that you used since your computer became infected.
Note the types of viruses that the antivirus software finds and, if possible, have it clean, quarantine or remove any infected files.
Check the web site for the manufacturer of your antivirus software to see if you need to do anything else to remove the viruses found on your computer and prevent them from infecting it again. Some of these web sites are listed below:

After you have verified that your computer is virus-free, you can connect it to the network again.
Check to make sure that your computer has all critical updates for your operating system and programs that you use. Install any critical updates that were missing.
If your computer was missing critical updates, make sure it did not get re-infected by rescanning it for viruses.

If you would like a "second option" about your computer's infection or would like to try an alternative approach to its treatment, you might try Trend Micro's free scanning engine available at http://housecall.trendmicro.com/. (Although this is a valuable and useful tool, it does not provide real-time scanning and is, therefore, not a viable substitute for a full antivirus package. It also has the disadvantage that your computer must stay connected to the Internet during the scan.)