Why Surfing the World-wide-web Without Protection Should Be a Criminal Offence

And the number of ways users can be infected is also increasing and consists of browsing internet pages, frequenting social networks like Twitter and Facebook, downloading files from peer-to-peer (music & movie) file sharing networks, responding to e-greetings fake news stories and phishing emails where users are normally conned or infected with out realizing.

In 2008 email accounted for virtually 80% of virus infections *. Files from FTP internet sites can harbor viruses or other threats which could then be downloaded into your computer. On the net news groups and chat rooms are sometimes infected by posted messages that include a virus.

Viruses commonly infect executable files with.exe or.com extensions, but they also infect web pages (.html, php and other people), Word documents (.doc), spreadsheets (.xls), and even image files (jpg, gif).

The wide scale use of the over the internet Online and more technologies to share data in the offline world via USB drives and other removable drive media means that infections can take place in far greater numbers and far quicker than ever prior to.

Around 11% of computers around the world are component of botnets responsible for 85% of all spam sent. This means an individual can be employing your laptop or computer to send SPAM emails and you don't even know it.

In addition around half a million computers are infected daily by bots *. Bots are programs that reside on a personal computer unknown to the user awaiting commands from their creator or controller. The computer is then employed unknown to its owner to infect other computers and join all infected computers together to produce botnets.

Botnet controllers normally rent out their network to be used for downloading malware onto infected computers or causing distributed denial of services (DDOS) attacks on sites.

A DDOS is where 10's or 100's of thousands of infected computers are directed to request internet pages from a web-site at the very same time. This effectively blocks the web site responding to page requests from real visitors to the site. The website then becomes inaccessible to actual users.

In 2010 there was a rise of malware, phishing and viruses targeting the new band of users accessing the Online employing mobile phones and iPhones, a trend that is expected to accelerate in 2011. It may well not be long just before using a computer without an up to date antivirus program automatically kept up to date with daily new virus threats becomes a criminal offence in some countries.

Just as with the spread of the human HIV virus you know you shouldn't have unprotected sex. Nicely surfing the Internet can get you a large number of other kinds of viruses and infections unless you protect yourself. So, practice Safe SEX and Safe SURF, get protected!

And while utilizing no cost antivirus software that's out of date or comes without every day threat updates is possibly much better than no protection at all, it's still as risky as having sex with an out of date condom that in all probability has small holes in it.

There definitely is no excuse for not buying a wonderful antivirus program, there are a good number of to pick from particularly for the home computer user that are under $25.