Modern Security Threats

Malware creators no longer distribute viruses that erase your data or corrupt something in your computer.  Now they want to have profit of breaking into your computer in all possible ways. Modern malware steal bank accounts, email accounts, identities, turn computer into spamming machine or use it for further malicious actions.

Botnets are the biggest threat of these days. Certain malware can be used to connect a computer to a virtual network and make it run needed tasks in a background. Needless to say computer’s owner doesn’t know that a computer is being used for cyber attacks or spam distribution. The first application capable of detecting and removing botnets has appeared recently. However, there’s a possibility that people won’t remove this kind of malware as most of them don’t even suspect that their computers are on zombie network.

The other big modern threat is the ‘drive-by’ downloads: the ones that sneak on a computer once you visit a malicious website. They don’t try to fool you and pretend to be a screensaver or free emoticons; you don’t have to click anything to get those. They simply install them selves through web browser security holes. However, this is not the biggest problem about ‘drive-by’ downloads. You had to visit obviously malicious website to get infected by these computer parasites five years ago. But the malicious websites are well masked today and even legitimate websites sometimes can be infected with this kind of malware. So even if you avoid porn and cracks, there’s still a possibility to be infected with ‘drive-by’ downloads.

Security experts forecast problems regarding to malware dedicated to smart phones in the several next year.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 7:50 am and is filed under Articles, General, Security, Spyware related issues, Viruses and parasites. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.