Across the board, our clients get spyware/malware infections. Not on a daily basis, but often enough to cause quite a bit of disruption.
We are asked why these infections are happening even with up to date virus and spyware protection – shouldn’t the infections be minimal or non-existent? You would think so, but that is not the reality we live in. Trend Micro recently reported that there are 3.5 NEW malware infections every 1 second. Yikes if that is even close to being true. No wonder why there are daily updates to the programs and no one software can successfully catch everything.
So why are there so many current and new spyware “programs” out there? The answer is easy – money. The motive of most of these things is to get your machine to click on websites, download programs, or create some sort of web traffic that translates to web page hits and money per hit.
So what can anyone do about this? I wish there was a magic bullet….
- First thing to do is to not click on any website or email link that you do not know anything about.
- When doing a Google or other search, only click on the results that look real and pertain to your search.
- Make sure you have up to date spyware and virus programs.
- Run regular scans.
- Lock down your computer if you can – easier said than done sometimes.
Interestingly someone on my team made a comment that no one gets virus infections any longer. You know, he is correct. We almost never see users with a virus and have only had to mainly deal with spyware/grayware/malware infections over the past couple of years and rarely a virus infection.
