We maybe dont realize it but we got something in our homes that our parents didn't, something that has made our lifes a lot easier, yes, that's it, the computer is the century invention. We can now hear some music (radio), watch a video (tv), talk with our friends (telephone), make a letter (pencil and paper) and even work in your computer. You can almost make everything in your pc!

But nothin is always pink colour, there is the black side of the computers, these are the viruses, trojans, spywares and other problems that can slow our machine, get information from us or even destroy important files from our jobs.

So what are these things? What do they want from us? Who made them? How can we fight them? Let's find out it.

What's a Virus?

A virus is a little program made by programmers, designed for install itself (without any permission from any user) on any computer, atack the files and create copies of itself in order to infect more files and computers (that's the reason it is called virus, it works as a real human virus).

All the virus are different, some of them only alter some data, others show some messages and other can cause critical damage to your computer.

How did i got a virus in my pc?

You may know the best way to protect from any disease is preventing, so we need to know how the virus can infect our computer.

There are many ways to get a virus in your pc:

• Some programs or files come with the virus in them. Why? Their competitors want to defame their brand or you may have bought or downloaded an illegal copy of one program. The viruses can be in any kind of program even Word and Excel files.
• The virus copied itself from another pc from your local network.
• By reading atached files to unknow sources emails.
• By downloading files from non-trustables websites.
• Careful with your USB!! A virus can easily invade your USB if you put it in an infected computer!! (and also infect your computer if the USB has the virus)

Try to avoid non-trustables websites, never open unknow sources emails, always scan your usb or try to don't connect it in computers you don't really know, use a good firewall (will recommend later) and antivirus and all will be fine.

What is a Trojan?

First of all let's talk about their name. Why they are called Trojans?

They got the name Trojan because of the similarities with the Trojan Horse used by the greeks to invade Troya. They come undetected to our computer, maybe in other application. They are installed in our computer and start to execute their different behaviours.

A trojan make your computer vulnerable to other person, they can do everything they want with your computer, like opening your Cd room, erasing some files, reading your conversations or just shutdown your pc (some trojan where used and are used to hack some msn or passwords)

Be careful with the trojans they can create BackDoors in your pc, a backdoor is a hole in your pc security that leaves many people from the internet to invade your computer privacity, and some people use this to send advertising in popups called Adware (there is a program with the same name used to erase the Adware if you got this problem), this Adware is very annoying so it's good to avoid it, nobody likes lot's of popus opening every website you visit.

Spyware Definition

We may have listened this word a lot this last years, spyware, but do we really know what it means? Let's learn about it.

Like it name says, a spyware it's a program to SPY your computer, your information, what you do, what you buy, what pages you usually visit and more. This information is useful to many companies so the Spyware creators sell the information to the companies and earn money this way.

Why is a Spyware a bad thing?

• Nobody likes the others to see their information, they can even take information about your passwords or credit cards so it's really a problem.
• And if they don't take your important information; the spywares are all the time sending information from your pc, that makes your pc go slower and slower, the more spywares you got, the more slower your internet connection will be. You used to access some places in 1 second and now it takes like 10? Blame the Spywares.

Worms

A worm is only a program created to make multiple copies of itself on a communication channel, like the e-mail (mainly this one), messengers (when you see other person wrote something to you that he really didn't like "see my photo") or p2p networks.

Their mainly objetive is to reach the most quantity of users so they can distribute the viruses, trojans or spywares.

Don't let the worms use your computer to distribute viruses!

• Never open an email from an unknow source.
• Never click on a link from your friends if it seems weird to you, things like "See my photo" or "Look we are in this photo together" are known phrases that uses the worms to reproduce themselves in msn, before clicking on the link, ask your friend, What's that? So you will know if they really sent you the link or it was the worm.

So how do i protect from virus, trojans and spywares?

Well it will depend if you want to prevent the problems, to fight the problems or to surrender and start again. I suggest to prevent and fight at the same time using Antivirus + Firewalls, and scanning your pc every month with Hijackthis for being sure your pc is 100% cleaned.

Let's learn more about each one of these programs.

Antivirus (Prevention and Fight)

Any antivirus is a program created by corporations of informatic engineers, all they mainly focused in the Security Specialization. There are many antivirus from different brands the best are (for me) Norton, Karpersky and NOD.

The antivirus programs are always looking for new viruses, trojans and spywares, adding them to their database and saving the way to destroy them, that's why you need to have your antivirus always updated

The best way to protect form viruse s is using an updated antivirus (like it name says is a program in charge of destroy viruses), remember new viruses are being created all the days for different purposes and you can get one in your computer, so if your antivirus is an illegal copy (so that you can't update it) it won't be enough for having your pc cleaned.

Your antivirus must be updated every 3 months in order to have the most complete list of posible viruses.

The best antivirus are:

Norton Antivirus: Very Complete antivirus with updated Lists of new viruses, very easy to use, a bit heavy but it will protect from any spyware or trojan while surfing on internet.

Karpersky Antivirus: Very good service, once i found a new virus in my computer, sent them the information and they sent me a update for my antivirus to erase that virus the next day!

NOD: Very fast to scan your computer (twice than others), good preventing from new viruses or spywares and has an advanced code that allows to find new viruses just for their behaviour. It also uses very low memory and processor, so you don't need high requirements and you won't feel your computer slower after installing NOD.

Firewall (Prevention)

A firewall is like a door between your computer and the internet, it will only let enter trustable files and all the viruses can stay away. That's a nice way to prevent from viruses, trojans or spywares, really recomended to have one, try to keep it updated too, most of the antivirus already come with one.

Hijackthis (Fight)

If the antiviruses and the firewall have failed and you got viruses your antivirus can't erase or can't detect it's time to use Hijackthis.

Hijackthis is a program made by Trend Micro. It can detect and show all the processes that are running in your computer, all the processes will be saved in a logfile. In this logfile you will see the normal processes of your computer (like msn or ares) but you also will see the viruses, trojans, and spywares sending your information to internet and slowing your pc.

Hijackthis is very easy to use but not easy to recognize the bad processes, so what you must do is to run Hijackthis on your computer, it will generate a logfile.text file with all the processes it found, just go to http://www.security-forums.com/ (english) or http://www.forospyware.com/ (spanish) register there and show there your log, the proffesional people there will read your log and will tell you step by step what to do, which processes to stop and maybe another program to run, then your pc will be almost 100% clean and 100% more faster than before.

Format (Surrender)

If nothing is enough for fighting the viruses you got, the only thing left for you is formating your computer, try to save some important data from your computer reading the tips in the following hub Tip to Format Your Computer, and well after formating install a good antivirus and firewall.