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Malware is a generic term for bad software. Malware is malicious code planted on your computer, and it can give the attacker a truly alarming degree of control over your system, network, and data - all without you knowing. Malware is software written to infiltrate and/or damage a computer system without the owner's informed consent. Malware is a combination of the words 'malicious' and 'software' and is a piece of software (computer program) written by someone with mischievous or, more usually, malicious intent.

The Internet

Trojan horses also known as droppers are used to start off a worm outbreak, by dropping a worm into users' computer. A worm, on the other hand, is a program which actively transmits itself over a network to infect other systems. One of the most common ways that spyware is distributed is as a Trojan horse, bundled with a piece of downloaded software that the user downloads off the internet or a peer-to-peer file-trading network.

Many early malware programs, including the first Internet worm and a number of MS-DOS viruses, was written as experiments or just pranks generally intended to be fun or merely annoying instead of cause damage. However, since the dawn of widespread broadband internet access, more damaging software has been written for profit motive. Software offering to speed up the internet will probably contain malware. Some malware is known to interrupt your internet connection or even cause your PC to hang. Internet trojan horse programs, spyware, keyloggers, rootkits, pseudorootkits, hijackers, adware, annoyware, email relays, spam proxies, spam relays, scam downloads and email/spam robots are perhaps the worst security threat to individuals and institutional networks in existence.

Email

Email will still be an important delivery system for malware authors, though the rising adoption of email server security is making hackers turn to other routes for infection. Emailed malware is also looking more professional and those who assume they can identify any suspect emails through poor spelling,poor grammar or suspicious subjects will be caught out. Be very careful about any attachments, specially those that you receive from unknown sources. You should also be careful with attachments from those you know. Don't open email attachment you are not expecting to receive, even if it appears to come from a friend (in general you cannot acquire malware just by reading the text of a mail message, unless your patching is very out of date). By the end of the decade, the growth of email gave malware a very effective infection route into new machines.

Malware is a catch-all term for various malicious software, including browser hijacking software, adware and spyware. Malware is often included with 'spam' and avoiding "spam" will reduce your exposure . Malware is now being written for every possible OS (operating system), communications channel and businesses that do not patch their systems religiously or fail to use security software and internet protection software will find themselves at risk.

Any one not investing in security software, will eventually get infected. That's the hard truth! Maybe your PC is already infected... You may scan your PC for FREE here: SpywareRemover or AntiSpyware 2007.

Have a safe day :-)