Tips On Dealing With A Slow Computer

It can really be aggravating when you sit down at the computer to do something and it takes an eternity for the program you want to use to load. It is also aggravating when you have to wait so long for the next page to load that you cannot play the games on the social media sites, or get pictures your friends post to load without refreshing the page several times. When your computer starts to act like this it is tempting to throw it in the trash.

The problem you are experiencing is had by everyone that owns a computer at some time. It may not be your internet connection speed, or your internet provider, but it may be malware that is dragging your systems down and causing the programs on your computer to run slower than normal.

Malware, adware, spyware, viruses, and Trojans are all malicious programs placed on your computer by someone else. These software applications are used to gather information or to make your computer do the suspicious work they need done. When one of these programs are running in the background while you are trying to work another program then both of the programs will work at slower speeds than they should.

If your computer is running slower than you want it to, or slower than it once did, you need to first run your antivirus software scan to determine if there is a virus on your computer that it recognizes. Not ever virus will be recognized by your antivirus software, so just because your security program does not find a virus does not mean that there is not one there.

If your antivirus program reports nothing is found after a full system scan make certain that you have all of the latest updates installed. The updates may contain some new virus information that was not previously on your program. After you have updated your antivirus run the full system scan again to see if it detects something new.

If you do not discover the virus living in your backgrounds then you can purchase specialized programs for malware removal. These specialized software applications may be aware of virus threats that your original antivirus was not aware of.

When you absolutely cannot find the virus that has invaded your private space, and yet you are sure one is lurking there, you can go into the control panel of your computer and take your computer back to a time when it was working correctly. You can also remove the operating system that is on the device and replace it with another version that is not infected.

If you go as far as to remove your operating system then you must do this cautiously because if you do this incorrectly then you can render your computer useless. If you are uncertain about the process of removing your operating system, or of taking your computer back to an earlier time, then ask someone for help.

Antivirus software may be the solution [http://malwarefixfree.com/] if you have a slow running computer. You may need to get [http://malwarefixfree.com/malware-removal/virus-removal/] some advice from an expert if this does not solve your problem.

The Top 3 Operating System Computer Viruses

If you own a computer or have used one, you know that dangerous viruses or malware is out there to affect the operation of your operating system. A virus is an application that corrupts your files, terminates your hard drive, spies on you, or can permit someone on the other side of the Earth to control your system. Because there are many types of viruses lurking on the Internet, it will not take long before you fall prey to a virus attack. Everyone fears malware infection, but not everyone thinks of learning anything about them.

There has been a lot of research to find out the different types of computer viruses and similar security extortions in order to determine how they are programmed, how they normally damage your system, and how they spread. The significance of computer security has doubled in the previous years as people develop new methods to exploit various loopholes. It is now essential to keep your antivirus software up to date in addition to using exposure management. Although there are many viruses around, there are 3 computer viruses to look out for these days.

Here are 3 top operating system viruses that may threaten your computer:

Shamoon

This is the greatest threat to every person with a Windows computer. It is a Trojan virus which mainly attacks operating systems running Windows computers. At this time, recent attacks have been directed at businesses, but it has been known to spread to personal computers as well. It is proposed that the virus look for a certain data or file which is then forwarded to the creator. The virus covers its trails by overwriting files to cripple the operating system. It can also spread to other networks very easily

Ransomware

This one is particularly tricky because it can look very legitimate to the average user. A message is displayed in the screen which appears genuine. It says you must pay or you will not be permitted to operate your computer again. This is usually a virus and a scam. The developer hopes you will be scared and pay the counterfeit fine. Microsoft offers excellent advice on how to deal with the situation when you come across ransomware.

Email Viruses

Finally, public networks continue to be targeted as people increasingly open accounts. Facebook has the highest number of users hence you should always be watchful of scams related to this service. One of the newest viruses deceiving users is an email notifying you that a friend has added a new photo of you. Through clicking the attached zip file, you download a virus. The email seems legitimate because it uses a Facebook template. Facebook will almost never send an attachment through mail.

These 3 viruses are the biggest threats to most computer users right now. This changes pretty regularly, so it's important to have up-to-date information on the greatest viral threats. If you want to learn about the many different types of computer viruses, check out typesofcomputerviruses.net.

Protect Your Computer From Attack

Your computer is a waiting playground for viruses and malicious malware. The controllers of these evil entities would like nothing more than to get inside the confines of your hard drive and take over your domain. The virus creators are lurking in the shadows waiting for their chance to infiltrate your encampment.

You must protect your computer from attack by these evil entities. In order to protect your system and keep your computer running like it should you are going to need to have a firewall in place. A firewall will prevent a lot of the intruders. There will be some persistent threats that will find a way around your firewall, but for the most part you will be protected as long as your firewall is enabled and running.

Antivirus software was created to detect and capture any threats that make it past your firewall. The antivirus software that you have will keep threatening programs that slip past your firewall from doing harm to your system.

You can also surf the web responsibly and stop a lot of these threats from occurring. Your biggest chance of getting a virus will occur when you are downloading a game, a song, or a video. You have to make sure that a download is safe and free of viruses before you accept it on your computer.

Shareware web sites have more malware infections than almost any other web site has. Shareware happens when average people are allowed to upload video, music content, software applications, and movies, to a server for other people to come and download for no charge. These sites are very popular with music lovers because they can make CDs of their favorite music and not have to pay for the download.

The shareware sites are also a favorite place for malware distributors. All they have to do is get you to download the content that has their bug in it and they are inside your computer. You need to stay away from shareware sites.

Porn sites have the highest concentration of viruses of any other type of website. You can almost guarantee that when you visit a porn site you are going to find something ugly lurking in the shadows. Your best bet is to avoid porn sites completely.

When you have done a lot of surfing makes sure you run a full system scan with your antivirus to detect anything that might have followed you home.

Protection against malware [http://malwarefixfree.com/], and protection from attacks of foreign programs, starts with you installing the right security applications [http://malwarefixfree.com/malware-removal/virus-removal/], and using the internet wisely.

PC Locked by Ransomware - How to Remove Latvijas Policijas Virus

Latvijas Policijas virus description:

Latvijas Policijas virus is a dangerous and horrific ransomware that can lock the targeted computer for no reason. It is designed by cyber criminals to lurk into your compromised PC via exploiting system holes and other channels. Once installed, it will change your system settings and delete your important registry files. Terminate your several programs and block Internet access. Commonly, it will pretend to be the local government and then send you the bogus notification.

It claims that you have violated the law, such as visit prohibited and unauthorized websites, download adult-oriented and illegal materials and contents, etc. You are asked to pay a certain amount of fine within 48 to 72 hours in order to unlock your PC and restore your data. However, it is a total scam and they won't keep their promise. The only way is to find a surefire way to remove Latvijas Policijas virus promptly and fully from your PC.

How can you delete Latvijas Policijas virus manually from your compromised PC?

Follow the instructions to delete Latvijas Policijas virus as quickly as you can.

Step 1: If this ransomware blocks you into Safe Mode with Networking, you can try to start your computer into Safe Mode with Command Prompt by pressing F8 key many times. And then press Enter to proceed.

Step 2: Once the Command Prompt appears, type "explorer" and then hit Enter key to proceed.

Step 3: Then Windows Explorer will show up browse to:

Windows XP: C:\windows\system32\restore\rstrui.exe and press Enter.
Windows Vista/7: C:\windows\system32\rstrui.exe and press Enter.

Step 4: You can go to Start menu and launch Run, and then type regedit into the Run box and click OK to open Registry Editor.

Step 5: In the registry editor window, you should navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\Current Verson\Winlogon\

Step 6: In the right side of the window locate "Shell", right click on it. And then click on Modify.

Step 7: Find Shell in the right hand panel and then change its value into Explorer.exe by right clicking it if the value is different.

Step 8: Save the changes and then restart your PC normally.

Automatic removal:

In fact, it is not advised to get rid of Latvijas Policijas virus manually if you have difficulty in editing files and registry entries. Any mistake may result in irreparable PC damage. Why not use an automatic removal tool to remove this ransomware with a few clicks of the mouse. It can deeply scan your Windows PC, detect and remove the threat from roots. Keep in mind that you should keep it updated on a regular basis.

Spyware - The Snooper's Toolkit

Spyware is surreptitious software that gathers private information from your computer without your consent or knowledge and transmits the data it collects to someone else, silently in the background, using your internet connection.

Spyware can collect almost all types of data, including internet surfing habits, user logins, as well as bank and credit card information, along with your PINs, using key-loggers to record every stroke of your fingers. It can scan files on your hard drive, snoop on other applications (such as chat programs or word processors), install further spyware programs, and read cookies, relaying the information it gathers back to its author.

Spyware can also change the default home page on your browser or redirect your browser to web pages other than the ones you want. Some spyware can even change computer settings.

It is usually difficult to detect and is nearly always malicious in intent. Indeed recent surveys suggest that more than 60 percent of computers are infected with some form of spyware, and that more than 90 percent of users found to have spyware in their computers are not aware of it.

What are the dangers?

By monitoring your activity on the internet, spyware enables targeted advertising. In other words, it providers advertisers with the data they need to bombard you with ads based on your perceived preferences according to your internet activity. In this case, it is known as adware.

The result of tracking your behaviour in this way is a plethora of unsolicited pop-up ads. These can be really annoying, though hardly dangerous.

More seriously, because spyware is using memory and system resources as it runs in the background to gather and send information back to its home base via your internet connection, it can lead to system instability or crashes.

It can also have a negative effect on your computer's performance by installing additional software, redirecting web browser searches, changing computer settings, reducing connection speeds, changing the homepage or even completely disrupting network connection ability.

You can cope with all these problems. The real danger is the very strong possibility of financial fraud using your bank account and credit card details that, along with the related PINs, spyware collects when you engage in internet banking.

How does spyware get into your computer?

Spyware is usually installed when you download some free software or shareware you actually want... the spyware piggybacks on the installation. One of the commonest ways to become a victim of spyware is by downloading some of the peer-to-peer file swapping products that are available today.

The writers of spyware programs often simply repackage freeware and bundle it with their own spyware. Others may pay shareware developers to bundle their spyware with legitimate software.

Indeed, the licensing agreements that accompany software downloads sometimes warn the user that a spyware program will be installed along with the desired applications. Unfortunately, few people read these agreements before clicking I agree or Yes. But even if you read these agreements closely, you will notice that the reference to the spyware is usually couched in obtuse, hard-to-read legal disclaimers.

What can you do to prevent spyware getting in?

There are several ways you can try to prevent your computer from being infected with spyware:

• Don't download free programs or applications unless you are absolutely sure that they are OK. Think: why would anyone create a piece of valuable software and give it away free of charge?
• Read licensing agreements carefully and if they are couched in obscure legalese, forget about it.
• Be ultra-careful when using peer-to-peer file swapping.
• Undertake regular maintenance of your system.
• Ensure you anti-virus software is updated regularly and that it checks incoming software before it is installed.

But no matter how careful you are, you are bound to join the 60 percent plus of users who are the victims of spyware in some form or other.

How do you get rid of spyware?

Getting rid of spyware is more art than science as many writers of spyware make removing these malicious programs purposely difficult. Some of the code may be hidden from Windows.

But with a few free tools, plenty of time, some know-how and a bit of luck you can do it. First the tools... four free tools you can download online:

• Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool... available free of charge from microsoft.com
• Microsoft's Windows Defender... available free of charge from microsoft.com
• SuperAntiSpyware... available as free edition and professional (paid) edition from superantispyware.com. The free edition does a decent job of removing spyware or viruses.
• Your anti-virus program... (You do have an anti-virus program installed, don't you?)

Note that some spyware can prevent you from downloading these tools or even from visiting the Microsoft website. If this happens, download the applications to another computer, copy the installers to a USB drive, plug that drive into your computer and install from the USB.

Spyware usually manifests itself as slower-than-normal performance. But poor performance can be due to other (unrelated) reasons, such as having a hard drive that has not been fragmented for some time or is full, running too many applications with insufficient system memory, or bugs in a program that prevent memory being freed up when you close it. Check these factors out first before deciding that you have spyware.

Then, follow these four steps:

[1] Run the Malicious Software Removal Tool first... making sure that you have downloaded the latest version before running it. Though this tool only searches for a small fraction of all the malware you can pick up, the ones it finds are the most serious threats. If this tool does not find anything, go on to the next step.

[2] Use Windows Defender, after first making sure you have the latest updates, to perform a full scan. If the program finds malware, follow the on-screen instructions to get rid of it. You may need to reboot your computer as some spyware does not let you uninstall it while Windows is running. If this tool also comes up empty, do step 3.

[3] Go to www.superantispyware.com and download and install the free edition of the software. Once the software is installed, click on scan your computer. The scan will take several minutes depending on HDD space and then remove any threats that have been found.

If Super Antispyware cannot find the problem, go on to the next step.

[4] Run a full scan using your anti-virus program. This will take several hours, perhaps overnight. The program should deal with any suspect files automatically.

It is unlikely that one of these three programs will not solve your spyware problem. However if that is the case then you have picked up new type of spyware that has not yet been included in the anti-spyware databases. Now you need to check every process running on your computer to see if any of them is spyware. This can be quite a daunting task.

Though there are tools that can help you by showing you everything that is running on your PC, enabling you to decide whether a particular program is legitimate or not, running them requires a certain amount of expertise. Caution: you should be aware that if you perform certain removal steps improperly, your computer could become inoperable. Thus it would be best to seek expert help.

Alternatively you could go nuclear... this entails backing up all your data onto external media, formatting your hard disk and then reinstalling your operating system using the DVD that came with the computer when it was new. You will then have to reinstall all the applications you have as well as all your data files. This will probably take hours, perhaps a whole day to re-install everything. But you'll end up with a super-clean machine that's as fast as the day you bought it.

Using online expertise

Removing spyware seems a scary task if you have never worked on your computer before. If you don't feel up to removing it yourself you will need outside help from expert technicians.

One solution is to bring your computer down to a computer repair shop or get a technician to visit your home or office. This can be expensive, probably costing at least €100.

A less costly solution, which is just as reliable, is to contact an online maintenance and repair service. The service will, with your permission, open a secure connection into your computer from a remote location and take care of your spyware problem while you watch the process on your screen or do something else. Expect to pay about €25 at the most for this kind of service.

A bonus with the online solution is that the technician who handles your problem will have a supervisor and plenty of back-up experts to hand for additional advice. Repair shops normally only have one or, at the most, two technicians on the premises.

Beware CryptoLocker Virus!

I typically don't like to put out a warning every time a new virus rears its ugly head. I worry that by issuing a warning about specific computer viruses that it creates the perception that people should only worry about viruses we talk about it - instead of being constantly on the alert.

The sad reality is that hundreds of viruses and variants of existing viruses are flung onto the Internet every single day. So, raising an alert about one particular virus seems silly in some respects. However, in this case, I think that reminding people of the need to be ever vigilant by talking about this particular piece of nasty is worthwhile.

I spent much of my Thanksgiving weekend recovering about 50,000 files that were damaged by one single infection of the virus generally called CryptoLocker. Here's what it does. First, it applies strong encryption to any documents (Word, Excel, PDF, etc) it can find on the host computer or any network shares. This encryption essentially makes the files unreadable (unless you have the decryption code). Second, the virus posts a ransom message asking for $300 on the user's computer! It's simply a 21st century shake-down.

Apparently, if you pay the $300 (through untraceable online payment methods) they will decrypt your files and make them accessible to you again. Sometimes, though, the decryption doesn't work - they didn't spend as much time developing the decryption component as they did the encryption part. Scary huh?

You can't decrypt the files on your own. Your only option, if you don't want to pay the ransom, is to restore your files from backup (which is what I did for this particular client).

How did they get the virus? It's hard to tell but it appears this one can come from various sources. It could have been from an attachment on an e-mail, or from an infected website, or maybe it was dropped by another virus.

But, you say, it couldn't happen to you because you have antivirus installed. Right? Wrong! The major antivirus software vendors don't seem to be able to catch this virus before it does its damage. Now, that's scary! The good news is that there is a way to block the virus by making a configuration change on your network. If you're a client of ours, we've already done that for you. If not, contact me and I'll tell you how.

The bottom line? It's always education and awareness. People need to be suspicious of unexpected file attachments. They need to understand that banks, couriers nor Microsoft will e-mail you asking for credentials or information. It's common sense. If you aren't sure about a website or an e-mail, then pick up the phone and call. Be suspicious. A little bit of paranoia can save you a lot of headaches and lost time.

How Spammers Find Your Email Address

Spammers use a variety of techniques to harvest email addresses. However the two main techniques are (a) the use of automated spiders and (b) directory harvesting.

Automated spiders

These are software agents that are known under a variety of names... spiders, crawlers, robots and bots. These spiders are the seekers of content on the internet. They form the basis of how search engines, such as Google and Yahoo!, work.

Search engine spiders trawl the internet unceasingly looking for content. Their searches are based on important words known as key words. The engines keep an index of the words they find and the website where they find them. Users of the search engines can then find these sites by keying in the search words. A major search engine will index hundreds of millions of pages, and respond to tens of millions of queries every day.

A spammer collects email addresses in a similar way... by sending an automated spider throughout the internet looking for addresses that are found on web pages or in links used to send emails. The spider sends them back to the person who is compiling the spam list.

The spammer's spider will trawl a variety of websites looking for addresses. These include dating sites, chat rooms, message boards, Usenet newsgroups; in fact any type of webpage that might conceivably contain an address.

If you have ever sent your address to anyone on the internet, have inserted it in a form or have you own webpage with your address on it, you can be absolutely sure that your email address has been harvested by numerous spiders working for compilers of spam lists.

Directory harvesting

A directory harvesting attack, aka a dictionary attack, is another common technique for creating lists of addresses. It is used to collect addresses from internet service providers (ISPs), mail services such as Yahoo!, Hotmail and AOL, and large companies with their own mail servers.

The attacking software sends millions of emails to addresses on a particular server. It makes these addresses up using sequences of minor variations on a basic address. For example, the software could send the same email to a series of addresses such as akennedy / bkennedy / / ckennedy@yahoo.com and so on.

Nearly all these addresses will be invalid, in which case the server will respond with an SMTP 550 error message. The harvesting software will ignore these addresses. But every now and then the software will get lucky and the server will respond with a message that an email address is valid. The software will compile all the valid addresses into a list for spamming.

The software will probably send out millions of email messages just to find a few hundred valid addresses, so this seems a very inefficient way to harvest email addresses. But the whole process is automated, so it costs the spammer very little.

Other email collection techniques

There are several other ways email addresses can be harvested.

One of these is to set up a webpage offering to send a product or service free of charge as long as the user provides an email address. Examples of these kinds of sites are those that promise to send a joke-of-the-day, daily quotes from the bible, news or stock alerts, and so on. I recently came across a site that stated that there could be a registered sex offender in my area and that I could get further information by email!

In sum... there is little you can do to avoid having your address harvested by spammers. The best you can do is to make sure you are running good anti-spam software and that you keep it up to date.