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Email Viruses Research

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Living in a digital age we are all faced with the threat of exposing our private information every time we log on to the internet, because of this it is extremely important that people know how to protect theirselves from digital threats. In order for people, to protect themselves, they must be aware of the basic types of malicious software, how they are spread and how to combat them. The generic virus is software which has been designed to do harm to a computer, replicate itself, and spread to other computers. While viruses can be spread via CDs and USB drives, the most common way for them to be distributed is through email attachments.(Brown 20-21) Email viruses have been known to search an infected persons email account, and send a …show more content…

Trojans disguise themselves as legitimate programs, such as a game or Anti-Virus software, and can only infect a computer once they are downloaded from the internet. While some Trojans are sneaky and attempt to hide their presence, others attempt to bait the uninformed into paying the creator money to protect themselves from a “virus” that their computer has been infected with.(Brown 20) A prime example of these types of Trojans would be AntiVirusXP 2008. This program would trick users into believing that it was part of the built in virus protection on the Windows XP operating system. This program would then make users believe that their computer has been infected with a multitude of viruses and that they need to run the fake anti-virus program in order to remove them. When in truth once it is run the program would download other malicious software and further infect the users computer with potentially system crippling or information stealing viruses.(Rogue Security Software I Fake Anti-Virus Alerts I Scareware.") One of the stealthier types of Trojans is known as a password stealing Trojan. These Trojans make a copy of any passwords stored on an infected computer, and copy any keystrokes that a user makes when it believes that they are entering a password.(Trojan Virus) Because these types of Trojans work in the background users may not notice that they have been infected. The absolute best way

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