Is your PC safe? (part 1)

Many times I’ve stumbled upon a PC which contains lots of malware inside. Lots of people complain that their PCs are getting slow and shows weird symptoms. When I do some inspection, I often find that these people didn’t get the safety protocol right. No antivirus, outdated virus definitions, didn’t update the operating system, no anti-spyware, etc. etc.

It is important for a PC, even without an internet connection, to have a good and up-to-date antivirus. Most antiviruses today allows the user to update offline, allowing PCs without an internet connection to keep the antivirus up-to-date. Some users ignore this important step by leaving the antivirus outdated, sometimes for years, causing them to be vulnerable to the latest threats that lurk everyday. From my observation, most of them are computer illiterates, so they tend to think that just having an antivirus can already keep viruses at bay, even if it’s a new threat. If you still don’t have an antivirus yet, here’s a couple of free antiviruses that you can try:

• Avira Personal Edition
• AVG Antivirus

The strength of an antivirus doesn’t really depends on its popularity. Often, hackers and programmers aim to bypass the most popular antiviruses first, then followed by the less popular ones. However, as most antivirus companies provide new definitions amazingly fast, these threats are easily countered once you have your antivirus updated. There was a report that the most popular antiviruses have an 80% miss rate, that’s right, an 80% miss rate, for new threats. But fear not, most of them are weak and rarely reaches you in the wild.

It’s a good idea to scan your thumbdrive (also known as pendrive, flashdrive, USB drive) right after you insert it into your PC. The law also applies to floppy disks, external hard disks and memory cards (via card readers or any electronic device). This is because viruses can also spread via removable drives like these stuff. Nowadays, a new type of thumbdrive that is able to use a built-in software (called a U3 drive) is able to use a portable antivirus (avast! U3 Edition) which is capable of real-time scanning. Real-time scanning is a feature that allows a file to be scanned when it is accessed, rarely found on portable antiviruses. This is indeed a good feature, and I found out that lots of viruses were trying to access my thumbdrive the moment I plug it in. Often, with this antivirus, I can even clean up the infected PC that I’m using.

A method I use to prevent viruses infecting my PC via removable drives is by disabling both Windows AutoPlay and AutoRun, as most viruses use these features to execute themselves and thus infecting my PC. If you want to disable them, for now try Googling for it, but I’ll make a blog about it in the future.