Pages

Thursday, April 28, 2011

How to keep your computer clean 2

2. Another way computers often get infected is by accessing compromised sites.
Usually this is the result of spam (e-mail, instant messaging). If you open a link in your e-mail that goes to www.hack-blablabla-windows.com/cheap/ for example you will probably end up being a spammer as well. The main idea is to understand what does a 'trusted site' means.
Recently, Google introduced a warning filter if you try to access an untrusted site from their search engine. You can also install in your browser a toolbar (Mcafee Site Advisor for Firefox - for example) that displays a safety ranking of the website. If you are an Internet newbie, this could be pretty useful for you.
Besides e-mail, a new generation of viruses started to infect instant messanging as well. If you are using Yahoo Messenger for example, you could recieve sometime in the future a message (from a trusted contact) like the one in the picture bellow.
 

Never open these types of links. If you are too courious, ask a confirmation from the contact about the message and the content of the page. Maybe it looks safe by opening a link to a *.jpg (picture), but the webpage also contains a java script that opens and runs a visual basic script (vbs) on your station - this allows writing and full-permition execution of a file, infecting your PC.

No comments:

Post a Comment