There are times when you do not want to download anti-virus software. These may include: Your computer is too infected or broken to install new software You are on someone elses computer and you don’t want to install software You just need to do a quick check, without the hassle of software installation The solution for virus scanning at those times is to utilize an online virus scanner. Note: Most online virus scanners require Internet Explorer with ActiveX enabled. Online Virus Scanners Trend Micro Housecall Trend Micro HouseCall thoroughly scans Read More

Email phishing scams have been around just about as long as email itself. The term email phishing refers to the act of maliciously sending a fake or fraudulent email in order to trick the receiver into visiting a malicious website, downloading a malware infected email attachment, or purposely giving up vital pieces of private information. The next generation of phishing attacks is referred to as spear phishing. This attack is similar to traditional phishing, except that the phishing email is only sent to people in a small, related group such Read More

Western Digital (WD) Portable Hard Drives are capable of storing quite a bit of information. Modern Western Digital drives come with a firmware called “SmartWare,” which can be useful to some users. The SmartWare can provide backup solutions that may not be available with the operating system in use. WD hard drives with SmartWare also have some utilities that some users will find useful if their computer can support them. The WD SmartWare may also be useless to some users who may want to remove it. The most common reasons Read More

The Zeus Virus is the popular term for the Zeus banking Trojan virus recently used to steal banking account details and passwords in the U.K. Resulting in a loss of more than $850,000 for those infected. The Zeus virus has been around for a number of years as part of the larger Zeus Crimeware Toolkit, and is available for purchase through rogue hacking forums across the Internet. Criminals who purchase the Zeus Crimeware kit are given a web interface panel to control the deployment and use of the Trojan as Read More

The most common viruses are boot sector infectors. You can help protect yourself against those by write protecting all disks which you do not need write access to. Definitely keep a set of write protected floppy system disks. If you get a virus, it will make things much simpler. And, they are good for coasters. Only kidding. Scan all incoming files with a recent copy of a good virus scanner. Among the best are F-Prot, Dr. Solomon’s Anti-virus Toolkit, and Thunderbyte Anti-Virus. AVP is also a good program. Using more Read More

Our current list of recommended free spyware removal software is: Spybot Search & Destroy AdAware Spy Sweeper Download, install, and execute this free spyware removal software and your system will be running better in about 15 minutes. Spybot Search & Destroy is free. AdAware has one version which is free for non-commercial use and two pay versions. Spy Sweeper is a subscription service, but you can get one database update as a demo. Many people run multiple free spyware removal software packages on their computers to increase their odds of Read More

The first computer virus to openly make it to the public was a program called “Elk Cloner”. It was created by Rich Skrenta, a computer programmer who was in high school when this virs was created in 1982. Elk Cloner attached itself to the Apple DOS 3.3 operating system and was later spreaded by a floppy disk. When the virus was created, it was intentionally made as a joke by the high school student, who inputted the virus into a game in which the virus was set off after the Read More

A logic bomb is a program, or portion of a program, which lies dormant until a specific piece of program logic is activated. In this way, a logic bomb is very analagous to a real-world land mine. The most common activator for a logic bomb is a date. The logic bomb checks the system date and does nothing until a pre-programmed date and time is reached. At that point, the logic bomb activates and executes it’s code. A logic bomb could also be programmed to wait for a certain message Read More

Despite the claims that Macs are somehow invulnerable to cyber threats, Macs are, in theory, no safer to use than PCs or any other device. However, because PCs are still much more common than Macs and have been around for much longer, virus writers attack Windows users much more often than they attack Mac users. While this means that Mac users are attacked less often, they are still often attacked and are under the same obligations to regularly use antivirus software in order to protect themselves from malicious programs.   Read More

The Macintosh platform suffers from fewer spyware applications, and there are correspondingly fewer Mac spyware removal programs. MacScan MacScan is designed to detect, isolate and remove spyware, keystroke loggers, trojans, and bring awareness to remote administration type applications which could have been maliciously or inadvertently installed on your Macintosh. MacScan is available for Mac OS and Mac OS X containing the latest definitions for spyware. MacScan detects, isolates and removes: Spyware Keystroke Loggers Trojan Horses Administration Applications MacScan will locate these stealth software applications, warn you of their presence, and Read More