When you are connected to the Internet, your computer
is open to attacks from the outside, and you should protect it.
Especially if you are connected through cable or DSL, a firewall
is a must! What does a firewall do?
It protects your computer from crackers and hackers who may want
to steal your data, take control over your computer, or even destroy
it.
McAfee
is a well-known specialist for firewall and virus-scanners:
2. Virus-Scanner
You probably have heard about the "I
love you"-Virus, "Anna Kournikova"-Virus and
others. To be safe, everybody connected to the web should
have a virus-scanner installed!
There are more than 57.000 viruses on the
run, so protect your computer, your valueable data and yourself!
There are different forms of computer viruses:
A computer virus is executable code
that, when run by someone, infects or attaches itself to other executable
code in a computer in an effort to reproduce itself. Some computer
viruses are malicious, erasing files or locking up systems; others
merely present a problem solely through the act of infecting other
code. In either case, though, computer virus infections should not
go untreated.
A Trojan Horse is a program that performs
some undesired yet intended action while, or in addition to, pretending
to do something else. One common class of trojans are fake login
programs - collecting accounts and passwords by prompting for this
info just like a normal login program does. Another is a disk defragger
that erases files rather than reorganizing them. A Trojan Horse
differs from a virus in that the former does not attempt to reproduce
itself.
A Worm is just a self-propagating
virus, a famous example is the happy, or happy99-virus.
