Are Malware And Spyware Really That Dangerous? For years people worried about the threat of viruses to their computers and rightly so. A trojan virus was more than capable of causing mayhem on a home computer and nothing short of a meltdown if it got itself onto a server in a business. In fact any business that has been hit by a serious virus infection and suffered major data loss generally winds up going out of business within 12 months and in our experience we've seen that happen more times than we care to mention. But the landscape of computer security has changed a lot over the years and continues to evolve and part of that evolution has been the shift in focus in dealing with online threats to the home computer user. Viruses are now becoming less of a worry because malware has now taken over the reigns of causing computer users all over the world the kind of headaches they could gladly live without. Let's stop for a second though and explain malware first. Malware is short for (mal)icious soft(ware) but you might be more familiar with the term spyware which is very similar to malware but malware is a more of a catch-all term for the various types of computer threats that exist online including spyware, rootkits and even some types of virus. So why has malware become more of a threat than the plain old boring computer virus? Well there's a simple answer to that folks - the Internet and the mass use of the Internet by billions of people on planet Earth. Human beings have never been so connected to each other in the history of our species and we can now share ideas and information with each other at the speed of thought. Back when computers were used mostly by nerds and geeks (even though we kinda resent those terms) the virus was more common but because the average computer user was pretty security aware they never achieved widespread penetration when it came to a virus outbreak. The Internet has changed all that though and now the people who code malware and spread it have a target audience of billions. And not only is their target audience bigger but most home computer users simply don't take the threat of a serious spyware or other infection seriously. We've lost count of the number of computers we've worked on that had absolutely no anti-virus or firewall software. Zilch. Nadda. This means you're leaving the door wide open to these guys to infect your system with a variety of nasty bugs that can do anything from trashing your registry to stealing elements of your identity including financial and other personal information. And the worst part about malware hitting your computer is that it doesn't happen like in the movies where you see a skull laughing at you on your screen or some nonsense like that. In fact the most well designed malware will be so discrete you won't even know it's there and it will quiet happily sit in the
background doing whatever it was designed to do which is usually something you wouldn't like. If your computer isn't protected by a combination of anti-virus software, a good firewall and you run regular scans with a leading spyware/malware checker then you have no idea what's going on inside your computer. To give you an idea of how bad it can get if we have to work on a computer that's been online without proper protection we'll usually find more than 80 separate pieces of malware on that computer that need to be cleared. So yes malware is something you do need to be protecting both you and your family against. For more information to fight malware Please visit us at SupportAfterHours Blog