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Thers a new anti virus software worth trying. Avira AntiVir Personal - Free Antivirus is a thorough, very convenient antivirus program. The software is designed to offer the most reliable virus protection, Free of Charge for use at home. Avira offers a comprehensive malware recognition of viruses, trojans, backdoor programs and worms that wreak havoc in the entire internet system. It provides the user with automatic updates in increments, of anti virus signs, engines and full softwares. It offers permanent virus protection with its feature, Virus Guard. It monitors your system in real time. It is very easy to use, With just a click of a button it installs and configures according to the system specs. Virus protection whether known or yet unknown threats because it uses advance heuristic system. You can set the scanner to allow virus scans automatically and update itself with the Scheduler. It has a web site where you can research about the type of virus or infection that has installed in your system with the Knowledge Base. It also has Rootkit Detection and Removal. This is definitely one software you should not miss out in trying.

A new virus, the W32/Nyxem-D, which spreads via email attached file. The damage that can be caused by this virus is massive. When opened, infected attached file it gets into the system and start delivering itself to all the available email addresses residing in the infected computer. Once activated, the virus it overwrites all DOC, XLS, MDB, MDE, PPT, PPS, ZIP, RAR, PDF, PSD and DMP files and replaces their contents with the data string: DATA Error [47 0F 94 93 F4 K5]. This can spell big trouble because these files are integrated to the system drives. This means your flash drives, network drives, external drives or any drive ar enot immune to the virus. This virus is also known as “CME-24,” “BlackWorm,” “Mywife.E” and “Kama Sutra” and seems even capable of disabling out-of-date antivirus software. What should you do to protect your computer? Upgrade your antivirus software. If you don’t have an antivirus software installed and you don’t feel like buying them. There are excellent antivirus programs you can get for free. Take these precautions so that your chances of getting infected will be reduced drastically.

The damage done by these viruses and malware can reach to billions of dollars every year. And according to some research made by Computer Economics, the lost in the world economy is close to $18 billions and is having the trend towards a growth rate of 30% to 40% annually.

Mozilla is known is known for their Firefox browser’s ability to install different patches, language supports, skins, add-ons and the like. However, users of Firefox with the Vietnamese language support has complained that they have received unusual and unnecessary ads through pop-ups. Mozilla was quick to warn that this is not a result of a virus or a back door hack, but their program itself has coding problems. They said that those who have download the Vietnamese language pack since February 18 is surely infected by it. They are not currently working with a new Vietnamese pack and it will be available some time soon. Mozilla has advised everyone who has this pack to disable first the language in their add-on tools.

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Do you have media players in your computer? How about Real Player? If you do, then better check if you have an updated patch for it. Most Real Players still have the unpatched version, thinking that it won’t really do no harm if they don’t patch it. However, a recent report showed that hackers found a flaw in the unpatched version of the Real Player. The Active X control rmoc3260.dll that allows the person to play media over internet browsers has been the prime target of drive-by downloads. This is the most vulnerable part of the player since this DLL file allows automatic download from websites (even third parties).

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Are you a member of the social networking website called MySpace? They’re boasting millions of users and you might be one of them. Just a tip though, if you have received a friend request from someone you do not know, do not even try to open the profile. If the thumbnailed picture shows someone you’re not familiar with, then, reject the friend request in an instant. There are some malicious profiles that automatically downloads Trojans to your system if you click on the picture or any link on that profile for that matter. Common sense works best here.

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Kraken, the largest botnet (collection of bots that run things automatically) was revealed by researchers. They said that in this network, a total of 400,000 computers are infected by a malware, including computers from 50 Fortune 500 companies. What is disturbing is that, only 20 percent of the computers with the different anti-virus products can detect the said malware. Kraken is said to have the ability to change its code base, and that is the reason why most anti-malware and anti-virus products cannot detect it. This bot copies itself to other machines automatically when executed by another machine (auto bots).

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Hackers are definitely becoming more and more adept in permeating the internet world. Google, one of the top search engines, was victimized by these (should I say brilliant?) hackers. They tried to redirect legitimate websites such as ZDNet Asia and other CNET sites to malware sponsored sites to victimize other internet users. These hackers used different keywords (placed a wide range of searchable keywords in their websites) for search engines to find. If their websites’ popularity is high (by hits, Alexa scoring etc.), it will appear as the first website on every search a person does.

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