Online Virus in Messengers, Emails, and Portable Storage Devices

Did you know that your computer might be used for terrorist threats and illegal activities online at this moment?. It is possible that your computer is being infected with viruses as we speak and it might be doing activities as per the discretion of some unknown hacker for his activities. It might be tracking your financial data, prying on your computer for personal information or even trying to infect your friends as you chat with them. There are a lot of ways by which your computer can be affected with a virus, but mainly they come from three sources - Portable Data, Instant Messengers and emails. Though browsing unsecure sites and using pirated software can infect your computer, the above three ways are the most common and dangerous ways by which viruses spread across the internet.

Portable Data storage devices like CD-ROMS and USB sticks are very popular and hence virus creators specifically write spyware and Trojans which will affect these drives and hence propagate the virus as they are plugged or inserted into another computer. These viruses attack the auto-run settings and hence it will affect the victim the moment he inserts the drive into the computer. Viruses and Trojans spread through these means are done so that they are massively spread across the internet leeching on the victims PC and taking instructions from its creators and even sending your personal data across the internet.

Instant Messenger viruses are another popular type of viruses. Yahoo! And MSN viruses have been very annoying and disturbing to all users since the time they were popularized. These viruses usually spread in the form of links from the infected PC's. They send themselves as a harmless link to the friends to the victims virus affected PC and have a message attached to them. An example will be the popular MSN virus called the photo virus. It sends the friends of the infected user a message like - "Hey! Is that really you in this picture? OMG!" and a link to the virus. Most people thinking that this is some sort of a picture will click on the link and get infected themselves. And this chain continues across the internet.

Emails are traditionally the virus writers favourite. But this has been tackled to an extent with the help of technologies like Domain Keys and SPAM blacklists and other ways. Though the number of viruses that attach themselves to emails and mass send to all the people in the address book are almost gone, the ones that tend to phish out information from you still continues. For example, I usually get a lot of mails claiming to be from banks and that my account has been hacked up. It needs my password to reset my bank account . But when you check the links contained in the mail, you will see that it does not link to the bank, but to another site which looks exactly like the bank site. If you enter your username and password, they will get it and then your account will be hacked and money stolen by these virus creators.

So, if your computer is infected with viruses, your security is compromised and hence your personal information is in danger. Make sure you use the internet with care and check where you are entering your information to and what type of links you click or the type of sites you visit. You can use an antivirus to clean your computer off viruses. Have a safe browsing experience!

MSN Messenger virus removal instructions can be found on our site at MSN Virus.