There are estimated to be over 80,000 computer viruses in existence. These range from simple to complex viruses that will steal data from hard drives or will erase all of the files on the system.

Viruses

Gone are the days when viruses were transmitted on floppy disks or CD-Roms, with more people connecting to the internet it becomes important that adequate protection is taken to ensure that systems do not become infected. This is normally achieved by installing anti virus software. Just installing the software is not enough it has to be updated otherwise it effectively becomes useless. It is also important to ensure that patches provided by the operating system manufacturer are installed as quickly as possible.

Spy ware

Spy ware applications are as much of a problem as viruses. They can in fact be more of a problem than viruses. Unlike viruses spy ware does not self propagate. Their normal purpose is to watch a users activity send this information to a third party. Thy have also been used to steal financial information.

What are the signs of a Spy ware infection?

If any of the following symptoms exist you may have spy ware on your machine:

• Unwanted behaviour - Popup's appear, redirected to unwanted sites
• Degradation of system performance
• High levels of CPU activity, Disk activity, network activity
• Stability issues

It is quite common to not recognise a spy ware infection because it is assumed that these symptoms are down to hardware or operating system faults.

Think you may have a Virus or Spy ware problem?

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