OK guys i am doing a survey on computer viruses
i have picked several familiar and common questions about it ..
i hope for your cooperation...
and thank you so much in advance...
here it is...

1. Can I avoid viruses by avoiding shareware, free software or games?

2. Can an antivirus program itself be infected?

4. What steps should be taken in diagnosing and identifying viruses?

5. What kind of files can spread viruses?

6. is spyware somehow related to computer viruses?

It'll help, however there is no silver bullet to prevent you from getting viruses. Meaning there is no one single action that can guarantee you immunity.

Yes. Some viruses will target popular anti virus programs & try to either disable them, or hide from them.

Scan the windows registry for runonce entries.
Look in msconfig for anything launching a run32.dll. A legitimate program will not launch this way.
Monitor your task manager (taskmgr) & look for unrecognized processes.

Any file that can execute. exe, com, vbs

No. Spyware will target the host & collect data. A virus is a program that self replicates.

Btw, you are missing a question for #3.

No, vulnerabilities in non-free software still enable viri. Take for example the famous Sasser virus (/worm), you just need Windows... Which is certainly not shareware or free.



Any kind of code can be 'highjacked' to transpost malicious code. Even worse: some publishers try to sell you anti-virus programs in popup, but they are worms itself (scareware)



In addition to no2pencil, which are good things to see problems yourself: install a decent anti-virus, which has proven to be quite a good one (use known sources over the internet), do not install the first free one you see.



All. Any file can have malious code in it. It just needs to be executed, which can be directly like no2pencil mentions, or indirectly by abusing flaws in other software (Office macro's, Javascript, encrypted zip files where a small piece of the key is executed by the un-zip program, and so on)



This has two answers, depending on the exact definitions you use:
Yes: A virus is a bad piece of software, that abuses security flaws to spread itself and do some stuff. Spyware abuses the weakest spot of the computers nowadays: the end-user. The bad thing this virus does, is noterasing your hard drive but sending privacy sensitive inforamtion to someone else. The spyware also spreads itself.

If you use a smaller definition of a virus, only spreading itself as the main purpuse, then spyware is not a virus, because its primary purpose is retrieving your private information.

However, in 'the old days' all bad code was referred to as 'a virus'. Nowadays large different types have been made, and people have been starting to group them. I still think the term 'virus' is the superclass, of which spyware, trojans, worms and so on are inherit.

uhm sorry about that
3 how do computer viruses spread.. i prefer not to show it because it is very common others might not get interested...




thank you so much for cooperating
and also to Hary
i really wish i could xomthing for you two

This post has been edited by qaz1134: 5 Oct, 2008 - 03:23 AM

You could press the 'this post was helpful' button

What if I use Linux or Unix, can I still be infected with a virus?

This post has been edited by nirvanarupali: 9 Oct, 2008 - 09:53 PM

Absolutely. Any binary executable is supseptable to being infected.

Understand that Unix file types cannot be infected by Windows files, because the file system doesn't work that way. it would be like cursing in English to someone whom speaks Chinese. Your intentions would be ill fated, however unaffected!

Also, there is no Registry in Unix/Linux, so there isn't a mass honeypot (so to speak) to serve as a central repository of every piece of software or information for that machine. However, because of the server nature of Unix/Linux, when you do get a virus, it is in my opinion much more devastating. You could be running a spam server, illegal file server, or other illegal activies I don't dare mention, & not even know it!

A harmless example... but an example all the same.

Thanks for the info. I thought only Windows can be infected.

Unix and Mac are at the advantage that they aren't used as much as Windoze - hence it is much less profitable for a virus writer to expend time (and money?) on writing a virus for a non-windoze OS when they are likely to only infect upto something like 10% of computer users.

Whatsmore, those that use Linux (more computer literate people) are much less likely of making n00b errors that get you infected.

And also: because of the open source nature on *nix, many flaws are detectesd by users and corrected before they are abused by a virus.