How Malware Spreads on Windows
By Raine on Thursday, 02 October 2008 Once they've infected a system, viruses and the like can be very difficult to remove. For that reason, your best defence against them is to prevent them from infecting your computer in the first place. The most useful tool you can use to keep malware off your computer is your cerebral cortex. Just as malware is written to exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems, the distribution of malware exploits the stupidity of users. Malware is typically spread in the following ways: Email attachments One of the most common ways viruses make their way into computers is through spam. Attachments are embedded in these junk email messages and sent by the millions to every email address in existence, for unsuspecting recipients to click, open, and execute. But how can people be that dumb, you may ask? Well, consider the filename of a typical Trojan horse: kittens playing with yarn.jpg .scr Since Windows has its filename extensions hidden by default, ...