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Protect Yourself
What to do if your infected?

- Dont Panic!
- Disconnect your computer from the internet.
- Back up your important files.
- Install an anti-virus program and scan your machine.
Anti-Virus Detection
- There are four major methods of virus detection in use today: scanning, integrity checking, interception, and heuristic detection. Of these, scanning and interception are very common, with the other two only common in less widely-used anti-virus packages. Unfortunately, while scanning is very effective against known viruses, it is completely incapable of dealing with new viruses, forcing anti-virus analysis centers into a reactive stance.
- Scanning
: A scanner will search all files in memory, in the boot sector (the sector on disk that specifies where boot information is,) and on disk for code snippets that will uniquely identify a file as a virus. Obviously, this requires a list of unique signatures that will be found in viruses and not in benign programs. To prevent false alarms, most scanners also will check the code of a suspected file against either the virus code itself or a checksum of it.
- Integrity Checking
: An integrity checker records integrity information about important files on disk, usually by checksumming. Should a file change due to virus activity or corruption, the file will no longer match the recorded integrity information. The user is prompted, and can usually be given an option to restore the file to its pre-corrupted/infected state. This is an extensive process, and few virus checkers today utilize it.
- Heuristic Virus Checking
: This is a generic method of virus detection. Anti-virus software makers develop a set of rules to distinguish viruses from non-viruses. Should a program or code segment follow these rules, then it is marked a virus and dealt with accordingly. This allows detection of any virus, and theoretically, should be sufficient to deal with any new virus attacks.
- Interception
: Interception software detects virus-like behavior and warns the user about it. How to detect virus-like behavior? Use heuristics again. Many viruses will perform some suspicious action, like relocating themselves in memory and installing themselves as resident programs. Many software packages have this as an option, although most people usually disable it
Anti-Virus Software
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