[computersarecool]

My laptop was recently infected by win7 home security 2012. I removed it, but id like to know more about it. Here are my questions:

How did it get on my laptop in the first place?

Why was that made in the first place?

Has anyone else been affected by this?

[Elvandil]

There are around 1000 new infections released onto the internet every hour, nearly 25,000 new ones every day. Most antivirus software will catch only 20% of them. Luckily, most don't go very far, though some get spread all over the net. They are delivered in emails, placed by websites, or even left by hackers. In short, it is impossible to avoid them all if you are connected to the internet. the only way to protect yourself completely is to run in a virtual environment.

Why do people make these things? In many cases, for money. You can go to so-called "black sites" and buy a package of stolen credit card numbers. The internet as accessed through the Onion Router has no restrictions and everything from stolen cars to child porn, and peoples' identities, can be purchased there. A lot of malware steals information from peoples' machines. It's big business and big money is involved in these things.

Others just make these things for the same reason that people vandalize. I'm not personally familiar with what that reason is, since I only threw one egg on one Hallowe'en that left a stain on someone's cement basement and still am embarrassed and ashamed and have no idea why I did it. Others seem to have no such problems.

There are some free tools for virtualizing your system, like Returnil Virtual System. BufferZone Pro is now free, too.

[randysvh]

The moderator has given you an excellent answer. The one thing not mentioned is that getting rid of a virus is pretty easy, but the destruction it does in the registry and file structure are the main problem as it is quite difficult to figure out what got destroyed or permissions changed until you go in and try to do something that used to work and have to figure out what was done from the virus. I hate to say that there are two fixes.
1. Back up all of your data and programs that are necessary to you, and do a clean reinstall.
2. Back up all of your data and install a better choice of OS like a version of Linux that will let you do most everything you want included without any agenda from the software manufacturers and their pop ups.
Viruses leave a nasty trail of destruction and of course some worse than others. One thing is when you do your install make sure you delete the partition to get rid of rootkits and can reside in the partition structure even though you format the partition. If you do not have other partitions on the drive, delete the entire partition table by creating a new partition table and then your partition.

Hackers make money writing viruses and malware and they do it for fun to see how much they can get and when they see the positive results and how people open up their wallets, they write more and drives them to success at your expense.

randy

[computersarecool]

Thank you for the replies.

[TOGG]

Interesting article here about how malware is spread; http://isc.sans.edu/index.html and a depressing one about how good some of it is at evading detection!;http://blog.eset.com/2012/05/11/king...otnet-analysis

[lunarlander]

Like the sans.edu link says, update everything. There is a program called Secunia PSI, its free. And it scans your PC and notifies you about programs that have security updates. It even gives your links to the patch download.

[randysvh]

Doing updates in Windows especially Windows Updates is going to add to the system and the registry and making it larger and larger and slower and slower, besides the inconvenience of when it is going to do it and for how long. I always turn Windows updates off mainly because most of it has little to know effect on your personal system, and i have found causes more issues than solutions. Install updates at your own risk and be careful as to which ones you choose. So the question is how do you know which ones to choose? You do not know because they are all labeled as security. You have to read the details of each one and even then it tells you little about what it does or fixes. BE CAREFUL.

Secunia is excellent and Belarc Advisor will also give you a list of updates missing from your system.

[Snagglegaster]

Originally Posted by randysvh

Doing updates in Windows especially Windows Updates is going to add to the system and the registry and making it larger and larger and slower and slower, besides the inconvenience of when it is going to do it and for how long. I always turn Windows updates off mainly because most of it has little to know effect on your personal system, and i have found causes more issues than solutions. Install updates at your own risk and be careful as to which ones you choose. So the question is how do you know which ones to choose? You do not know because they are all labeled as security. You have to read the details of each one and even then it tells you little about what it does or fixes. BE CAREFUL.

Secunia is excellent and Belarc Advisor will also give you a list of updates missing from your system.

Other than your remarks about Secunia, this is about the worst advice I've ever read. Windows updates don't make a system slower; they make a computer more secure. The time spent downloading and installing updates is nothing compared to the performance hits you will see on an infected system and the time it takes to repair the machine.

[randysvh]

I knew that once i posted that advice i would get someone to disagree with my advice. First let me tell you that the registry in case you did not know is a data base which houses thousands of entries to start off with. As we all know in most database environments as you add entries and it grows it slows down the system and since this database is loaded into memory the more updates you get the larger it gets and the more memory you use and the slower the system becomes as it has to search through the registry database.

For your own testing and evaluation of my comment and advice i would suggest you install any base version of Windows, NO SP, than without doing anything else make a test to demark the status of the memory, and performance of the system. Now add in all of the drivers that were not automatically included, run the same test, and then once more after you have added in all of the updates if the system is still working at that point. You will see the difference immediately.

Using XP as a model, so why do you think that XP could run when it first came out with a minimum of 128MB and now you could not hardly begin to use it with less than 512MB, let alone satisfactorily without 1GB? The registry and the updates from Microsoft which are large and most of which have little to no effect on the average user. Not saying to never do updates, if you know what you are doing and to do it at your convenience, not when MS wants to take up your valuable time while you are in the middle of something important. Might also ask as to why it takes so long to install them if they are not that large and the updates have little to no effect on the base OS?

Glad you asked.
randy

[Cookiegal]

You need to do the critical updates to patch vulnerabilities or the system would get infected pretty much as soon as you go on-line with it. Of course they are going to take up space, as would anything else you install. The updates will run in the background and you can generally continue what you were doing but you can also choose to be notified when updates are available without installing them automatically so you can do it at your own convenience.

[Snagglegaster]

I'd never argue that many Windows updates aren't large, or that they don't a have big effect on OS files. Hint; security updates (and I'll include service packs in this group) make many changes to the OS; XP SP1, if I remember correctly, replaced something like 40% of the original Windows XP code. But, if you assume that all updates are just piled on the existing code like extra scoops of ice cream on a cone, that's a serious misconception; the patches fix vulnerabilities by replacing vulnerable code. So, yes, that sometimes requires large downloads and long installation times.

If you really want to see why Windows XP is slower now than 5 years ago and requires so much more memory, just look at your third party apps and drivers. Acrobat Reader, Flash Player, etc. are all far larger programs than they were a few years ago, and you can't download a driver that doesn't want to check for updates, monitor the status of your printer cartridges, upsell you on new products, etc. And they all want to check for updates in real time.