Adware is a type of advertising software that once on a user’s computer will display advertisements or try to download shareware for many different software products. Basically it is nuisance software that companies use to advertise their products to internet users. The companies that use it see it as a means of recouping some of the costs of e-commerce. A couple of Anti-Adware software packages that i have found are Adaware 2007, Oceanside Adware spyware remover and Spycleaner Gold 9.5.
April 30, 2008
Spyware
Spyware is a program which tracks and monitors a user as they visit websites and enter personal information. Not only can this program monitor a user’s activity, but it also has the means to redirect a browser to unwanted websites and advertising locations. Spyware can also change the settings on a user’s PC and lead to the loss of programs and files. Anti-Spyware software is now widely used and reconized by the vast majority of computer users. A few examples of Anti-Spyware software are Bazooka Spyware scanner, Advanced Spyware Remover and Spyware terminator.
Mail Bombs
A e-mail bomb or mail bomb is a form of attack by sending massive volumes of email to an address to overwhelm and overflow an inbox. The two ways that this act is perpetrated is by link listing and mass mailing.
Mass mailing consists of sending numerous duplicate mails to the same email ID. These types of mail bombs are simple to design; but due to their extreme simplicity, they can be easily filtered by spam filters. Email-bombing using mass mailing is also commonly performed as a DDoS attack by employing the use of “zombie” botnets, hierarchical networks of computers compromised by malware and under the attacker’s control. Similar to their use in spamming, the attacker instructs the botnet to send out millions or even billions of e-mails, but unlike normal botnet spamming, the e-mails are all addressed to only one or a few addresses the attacker wishes to flood. This form of email bombing is similar in purpose to other DDoS flooding attacks and, because it often targets dedicated hosts that handle the website and e-mail accounts of a business, can be just as devastating to both services of the host. It also is more difficult to defend against than a simple mass-mailing bomb because of the multiple source addresses and the possibility of each zombie computer sending a different message or employing stealth techniques to defeat spam filters.
List linking on the other hand, consists of signing a particular email id up to several subscriptions. This type of bombing is effective as the person has to unsubscribe from all the services manually. In order to prevent this type of bombing, most services send a confirmation email to your inbox when you register for the subscription on that particular website.
Firewalls
Firewalls can be either hardware or software that is designed to prevent unauthorised access to a user’s pc over a neteork or the internet. Fireawalls block any person or program from gaining access by only letting the ones that follow a specific set of rules entry and blocking the ones that don’t match the preset criteria. The user can tweak or change the level of access and the conditions that have to be met to gain access.
April 2, 2008
Macro viruses
A type of computer virus that is encoded as a macro embedded in a document. Many applications, such as Microsoft Word and Excel, support powerful macro languages. These applications allow you to embed a macro in a document, and have the macro execute each time the document is opened.
According to some estimates, 75% of all viruses today are macro viruses. Once a macro virus gets onto your machine, it can embed itself in all future documents you create with the application. Anti-virus programs can protect your system against most macro viruses, although new ones are always being created that slip by the anti-virus filters.
