Category: Security

The Internet is full of various kinds of threats – malware, phishing, spyware, drive-by-downloads. The cyber-criminals are now working in a well organized manner in order to steal your financial information and turn your computer into a zombie. Would it not be nice if someone warns you before you visit a fraud web site or a web site designed to infect your computer with malware? The McAfee SiteAdvisor can warn you about a web site as you open it in your browser.

How would you know if a link on a website is not malicious? How would you know if a file download link is not linked to a malware download? Do not worry, you can check and scan all links for malware using VTchromizer in the Chrome browser. VTchromizer is a Chrome browser extension using which you can scan any link for malware.

We have earlier covered an article about how to test your antivirus using EICAR test virus. That article covers, how to manually create the EICAR test virus. In this article, we will show you how to use the EICAR Test tool to automatically create the file for you.

When you download a file from the internet you expose yourself to unknown threats. An attacker can easily change the extension of a file and disguise it as harmless file. For example, an MP3 file can be actually an WMA file containing code to download malware from a malicious site. The only safe approach left is to identify a file type using their binary signatures.

We have earlier posted an article about how to automatically scan an inserted USB stick for viruses. That article makes use of the USBVirusScan tool from Didier Stevens. Pendrive Ninja Pendisk is another such utility which can be used to prevent infection from an inserted USB stick.

Is your antivirus software functioning correctly like it should? Will it detect if a virus is dropped on your hard disk? You can test your antivirus using the EICAR (European Institute for Computer AntiVirus Research) antivirus test file. The Eicar test file is recognized by all the antivirus products and they all should block it.

Even if you have a firewall software installed, it can allow some information to be leaked without your confirmation. The LeakOut tool checks if your firewall is configured in such a way as to leak any information easily. LeakOut is a simple tool to demonstrate how it is possible, in certain circumstances, to circumvent the outbound control/filtering systems of personal firewalls. So why not test the configuration of your firewall?

The Windows HOSTS file can be used to redirect a domain name to a different IP address. This technique is often used by malware programs to redirect users of infected computers to phishing websites or to infected websites. You can always reset the HOSTS file back to the default – restoring its contents to the same state as they were when you installed Windows.

When you install AVG 2011 free edition, it starts to make a cache of trustworthy files. These files are then skipped in the future scans making the scan faster. But this caching of trustworthy files takes a lot of time and keeps your hard disk spinning for hours. If you want then you can disable cache server in AVG 2011.

We have previously published an article on how to automatically scan an inserted USB stick for viruses. The latest edition AVG antivirus – AVG 2011 already supports this functionality without using any extra tools. But this option for automatically scanning a removable device is disabled by default in AVG 2011 free edition.