Category: Security

One of the common symptoms of your system getting infected with malware is browser hijacking – your browser is taken over by the malware to redirect you to malicious sites in such a way that you cannot alter the browser settings. But now you can avoid browser hijacking problems using the free Browser Protect tool available for the three major web browsers – Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Everyone carries a USB pen disks or SD card with them these days. These storage devices are vulnerable to malware infection and can also cause malware to spread from one computer to another. Often these storage devices are used on multiple computers which increases the risk further. The best practice to follow is to immunize your USB keys, micro SD cards etc. against such malware. The free Bitdefender USB Immunizer tool can help you protect your removable drives against such threats.

Though all kinds of malware are bad, but the nastiest of all are the banking trojans like SpyEye, Zeus etc. They infect your system and steal your banking account information when you try to carry out banking transactions online. FitSec has developed a tool called DeBank using which you can find out if your system is infected with five major banking trojans – Zeus, SpyEye, Carberp, Gozi and Patcher and all their variants.

It is no secret that the files you download from the internet may possibly be infected with a malware. If you try to open those infected files on your computer, then your system might also get infected. But you can choose a safe practice of scanning each downloaded file before you open them. Your installed antivirus works well for this, but you can use JottiQ for enhanced scanning with multiple anti-virus engines.

If you use the internet regularly, then you are exposed to the threat of the malware everyday. It is always better to protect yourself from getting infected in the first place, but even if you get infected with some malware, you can use the free IObit Malware Fighter to scan and remove the malware from your computer. The free edition of the IObit Malware Fighter not only allows you to scan and remove malware on your computer, but also provides the realtime protection.

If you have to send some private or secret message (for example, an email message) to someone, then you would want to encrypt that message with a strong encryption cipher. The open source Scrambled Egg program helps you do just that. It supports three step encryption – yes, it can encrypt your message three times – making the cracking of the message completely impossible. In the first step, it uses basic methods like ROT13, BZ2 or ZLIB. In the second step, it uses powerful ciphers like Blowfish, AES and RSA

It is not unusual to face situations in Windows when you cannot delete one or more files because they are in use by some program. This is very annoying and no matter what you try, those files seem undeletable. When trying to delete a file or a folder you may get different kinds of messages like Cannot delete file: Access is denied or Cannot delete folder: It is being used by another person or program. You can quickly remove such locked files using the free IObit Unlocker tool.

When malware hits your system, it is often seen that it makes changes to your Windows system and adds malicious sites to Internet Explorer trusted zone list. It also adds good sites (like sites of antivirus companies) to the restricted sites. The overall effect is that Internet Explorer shows no warning when opening those malicious sites, while at the same time it blocks good sites which may help you remove the malware.

Vista Antivirus is another fake antivirus software which infects your system, shows fake warning that your system security level is low and demands money for protecting your computer from the fake infections. It sets up malicious proxy servers in Internet Explorer, so when you try to download a genuine security software it can block those sites. It alters settings in the Windows’ registry to automatically popup its own window whenever you try to run any program.

XP Antivirus is a fake antivirus software which infects your system. It shows fake warnings about your system security level being low. If you scan your system using it, it will show you false reports of viruses found on your computer. This is just another malicious program which intends to fooling you into paying for bogus antivirus. It infects your computer in such a way, that whenever you run a program, XP Antivirus 2012 pops up and starts showing various fake warnings.