Anti-Virus/Malware Programs are Essential

PC Virus Doctors uses multiple anti-spyware/virus/trojan/malware removers to ensure that PCs stay as secure and clean as possible. Today's computing environment requires internet interaction to access emails and websites for information needed to run business and personal correspondance to keep our personal lives and businesses running as smoothly as possible.

There is always the threat of an infected email that finds its way into computers or embedded programs that are surreptitiously installed on legitimate websites. Many of these malwares, viruses, etc. are difficult to extremely difficult to uninstall and often times causes PCs to not be able to access the internet.

An anti-virus article on InformationWeek talks about the continuing necessity of malware removers regardless of increasing security in operating systems regardless if they are Windows, unix or linux. "Zero day attacks" exploits occur as malware authors seek out vulnerabilites in systems.

PC Users can Minimize Malware by:

1. Don't use file-sharing
2. Don't open attachments
3. Be careful when installing software
4. Be cautious when visiting websites
5. Make sure you are using the most up-to-date browser
6. Be sure the latest patches and updates are applied to the operating system
7. Update Java
8. Use the latest version of Adobe

Restore Points for Protection:

Users can assure restore points are available by peering into restore points via start>all programs>accessories>system tools>system restore and then clicking next to see if dates are listed in bold print and clicking on one or more to ascertain if a restoration is possible at certain dates clicked on and specific times and whether adding programs or removing programs is listed under the times in order to reverse undesirable computer behavior when those programs were installed or uninstalled.

Trend Micro Increases U.S. Sales

PC Virus Doctors have long used their virus scanner and now Information Week reports that their sales for security products have increased 11% in 2006 with an expected increase of 15% in 2007. Trend Micro credits the increase in sales partly with their partnership with Best Buy which is currently recommending the security product during in-house sales by "tech experts".

HckPk- the Latest and Greatest

Like we at Dallas Computer Repair don't have enough malware to recognize and neutralize, now there is a new technique employed to hide the old mainstay malware with masks that make them appear as unique or new when they are simply disguising who they really are.

A few weeks ago while laboring over a laptop repair, PC Virus Doctors could not find any malware although all the malicious software symptoms were present. Many scanners were employed, including online scanners and nothing was showing up. A rootkit was then suspected, however, no rootkit scanners were picking anything up.

The authors of Dref and Dorf have used several masks to hide their viruses and they can morf the masks into thousands of variations, according to Information Week's latest article. HckPk, the masking piece of malware, accounted for over half of malware seen in February's infections with over 6,000 variations. When the worm Storm hit the internet it morphed over 1,500 times the first weekend according to the ant-virus vendor Sophos.

As HckPk is able to mask and hide itself within conventional malware and be tweaked and tuned by virus writers it will leave anti-virus vendors with a hefty workload trying to figure out how to put a stop to the problem Not only is the unlimited morphing an issue but each morphed version must first have its code unraveled.

The solution to this new problem will no doubtedly bring a new module of anti-virus scanning to the heuristic model. That being said, with the morphing appears to have no set limits on how it changes so it looks like the anti-virus engineers will have their work cut out for the for quite some time.

The big boy vendors like McAfee and Norton, reputedly sequester their anti-virus teams until they can identify the malware and provide a "fix", may be in for a long-haul.

Break out the coffee pots boys and girls. It's going to be a long picnic.

Tech Boot CD

Check out our Tech Boot CD that can run complete several anti-virus scans, has many firewalls to choose from offering something other than Microsoft's firewall which is heavily targeted by hackers, spyware and adware removers, defragmenters, temporary file removers, specialized virus removers, plus hundreds of other tools, utilities and programs.