Whether you’re looking to protect a brand new PC, or remove any annoying virus that has managed to sneak on to your laptop, anti-virus software is essential. But buying anti-virus software can get expensive, especially after you start racking up the yearly subscription charges you’ll need to stay up to date. Fortunately, a handful of companies offer very effective free anti-virus solutions – many even outstrip competing commercial packages in detection rates and scan speed. Here are a few of our favorites.
Tag Archive: Virus
AVG Goofs, Makes iTunes A Virus
Antivirus updates do sometimes identify false positives, and that’s embarrassing. But over the weekend AVG pulled a doozie on iTunes.
It identified iTunes.dll and iTunesRegistry.dll library files as being infected with the Small-BOG virus, and consigned into quarantine. That meant, for AVG users, iTunes stopped working and people couldn’t re-install the software, according to The Register.
Within 24 hours, AVG had issued a statement and apologized and offered instructions:
Gumblar Virus Becoming A Major Threat
Never heard of the Gumblar virus? Nor have most people, but it’s rapidly becoming a major threat to PC users.
It works by hitting computers via vulnerabilities in some versions of PDF reader and Flash player software. Once PC has been infected, the virus redirects Google search results to sites that load more malware on the PC or let criminals steal login details for banking, social networking and websites.
Now Gumblar is spreading via compromised sites – so-called drive-by download exploits. Although Gumblar has been around for some time, it’s recently mutated, changing its style of attack, taking malicious code from a web page based in China, and developing new techniques to avoid detection, according to the Guardian.
Mystery Virus Hits MoD
It arrived two weeks ago, a mystery virus that’s hit RAF bases and Royal Navy ships, knocking out e-mails and shutting down some computers throughout the Ministry of Defence (MoD) – although it insists that operations remain unaffected.
The Ministry is still struggling to understand how the virus managed to breach its security, and there’s speculation as to where it originated, although some experts believe it was born in what was once the Eastern Bloc.
The BBC understands that in some instances, facilities are having to use snail mail or phone instead of e-mail. Conservative Member of Parliament Mark Pritchard is calling for a written Parliamentary statement on the matter.
Apple Suggests Mac Antivirus
Remember when Mac owners were so smug about malware because they were safe? Well, wave goodbye to those days. Now even Apple is urging Mac owners to use antivirus software, largely as a response to booby-trapped sites that can infect visitors, the BBC reports.
The company has posted a note on its support site, going as far as to recommend some products to be used together.
"Apple encourages the widespread use of multiple antivirus utilities so that virus programmers have more than one application to circumvent, thus making the whole virus writing process more difficult."
Computer Virus In Space
A computer virus has made it into space. The space news site SpaceRef reports that Nasa has confirmed that laptops taken onto the International Space Station (ISS) last month were infected with the Gammima.AG virus but stress that nothing on board is in danger.
They’re now trying to figure just how the laptops – which were used for nutritional programs and to let astronauts send e-mail to earth and which reportedly carried no antivirus software – came to be infected. Nasa suspects the virus might have been on a USB drive an astronaut took into space.
A Few Apple iPods Ship with Windows Virus
Apple Computer has announced that some hard disk-based video-capable iPods offered for sale after September 12, 2006, carry the RavMonE Windows virus. Apple says the problem potentially impacts about one percent of the video iPods made available for purchase in that time, and that the company has received fewer than 25 reports of a problem. But they’re still embarrassed: “As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses, and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it.” Apple’s flash-based iPod nano and iPod shuffle models are not affected
AOL Offers Free Antivirus Software
AOL today announced the free availability of its new Active Virus Shield for Windows 98, ME, 2000, NT, and XP, adding virus protection to the company’s new spate of free online offerings.
Based on software from Internet security developer Kaspersky Lab, Active Virus Shield aims to stop viruses, Trojans, spyware, and other malware before they can attack a Windows-based PC; the software also offers real-time scanning of incoming files and both incoming and outgoing email to check for infected files and other potential dangers. The software updates itself every hour via the Internet to pick up the latest virus and danger definitions.
Twenty Years of PC Viruses
Anyone remember the first weeks of 1986? That’s when a boot-sector floppy-based PC virus called Brain started turning up in the wild. Brain was written by two Pakistani brothers as a copy protection scheme for medical software they were developing. Compared to viruses today, Brain was a weakling: for one thing, it only spread via floppy disks: these were the days before widespread access to the Internet. And, unlike most viruses today, Brain wasn’t deliberately malicious, and actually contained the authors’ real names and contact information. Today, most viruses and worms are designed to compromise user’s privacy, trawl for personal data, grant remote control of computers, or flat-out obliterate users’ systems,
Daily Download: AIM Fix 1.0 (Updated)
AIM Fix was created to remove all known AIM viruses in one consolidated removal tool. It is designed to end the virus processes, delete the files, and remove registry keys created by the virus.
Download now at MajorGeeks
