Have you ever wonder, how data recovery software works ? I mean, everybody knows, when you delete files them are going to a special folder Recycle Bin, but what is happening when you empty Recycle Bin ? To understand this we must first understand how data are stored on storage devices e.g. hard drives. I don’t want to write a very “technical” article, instead I will try to keep it as simple as I can. The most commonly file system formats used in modern Microsoft Windows based systems are FAT (File Allocation Table) and NTFS (New [...]

I wrote in the past an article about Sandboxie and its add-ons but I feel a such powerful security tool deserve a  more aprofundated review. I run a small computers business and there are no rare the cases when people call me or come to me asking for an advice how to remove different malwares from the computer, therefore I’m not lacking for malware samples for analysis. Always I ask people when the computer infection occur, what they did before to get that malware, trying to track the infection source. Unfortunately very often the reason [...]

Almost any PC user use intensively the USB Flash Drives called popular memory sticks to transfer data between computers or between different devices as photo cameras, portable players and the computer. Many people use such a drive to share photos or music or even games with the friends and an Flash Drive with interesting content will travel from a computer to another borrowed by its owner. The  Autorun and Autoplay , a rather useless I dare to say and source of troubles Windows feature, and the portable character of the flash drives create the [...]

It’s much better to prevent a computer virus infection than to remove the virus itself but sometimes the inevitable just happen, therefore an article maybe accompanied with your comments and experiences about virus infection signs(symptoms) is necessary for a lot of us. To be able to  accomplish their main goal of stealing personal data, a lot of stealth malware are coded with low computer resources(CPU and RAM) consumption in mind and run unnoticed in your computer. One of the most advanced method to hide the malware presence, is using the [...]

Browsing today Yahoo Answers, I saw someone recommendation for the users to try IObit Security 360 as an advanced spyware and malware removal tool. Quickly I’ve done a Google search and I found the official site of the program http://www.iobit.com/, a site with a few interesting and useful freeware and commercial tools. …removes the deepest infections, and protects your PC from various of potential spyware, adware, trojans, keyloggers, bots, worms, and hijackers… they say in the official site. Good, let’s try it then. I’ve [...]

Today my kid 8 years old makes me “happy” again. He was browsing the Internet searching for online games and suddenly call me to see something at the computer. An avalanche of warnings and alerts was appearing on the desktop claiming the computer is infected and involved in illegal actions as spamming, the BIOS will be destroyed or will be necessarly to buy a new motherboard, I will be disconnected from the Internet and thrown maybe in the prison, and so on. The malware offered anyway a solution to solve ALL my problems : to buy Desktop [...]

It’s interesting what vision has PC users with not a lot of experience about their antivirus, how they feel about that software. It’s more about a feeling, yes, they perceive the antivirus like a comrade who defend them fighting back against all kind of nasty malware and zombies for their safety and peace, look how people speak about their antivirus :  “my antivirus says this or says that…” Well, if it’s about a comparison between an antivirus and a bodyguard who must defend me against the Internet threats, the [...]

The common way to protect against network threats is installing a Firewall, which theoretically will block all attemptings to estabilish a malicious connection, protecting the computer. It is well known fact that always first step a hacker do trying to hack a computer in a network is a port scanning to find what ports are open and can be used to “communicate” with the target computer. Ports are in range from 0 to 65535, and some of them are assigned for special use as : File Transfer Protocol(FTP) connections — port 21 Telnet — [...]

Today, when I was cleaning up my kids PC, I saw on the Desktop an object, kind of an icon, with name “Shredder” without an extension and with a behaviour characteristic to many malware programs –it locks itself on the desktop taking off the possibility to delete it and it has only two context menu(right click) options: Open Create Shortcut This is how the icon looks like : For all other files from the Desktop I have a lot of options as you all know like Delete, Rename, Cut, Copy, Open with, entries added by WinRAR(Add to archive), [...]

These days, when many software vendors are ready to do anything to increase  their incomes, including embedding adware and other unwanted programs in their products for advertising and marketing purposes, to analyse a program carefully before to run it, it’s a normal and desirable behaviour  install it fully in the computer. I’m  talking about less-known  programs, sometimes spreaded as freeware, sometimes advertised as program that will do “miracles” in the computer and finishing dropping adware and spyware in the computer [...]

A simple look at statistics from last 24h in virustotal.com site reveal the fact that only 2% from the files submitted are detected by the ALL antivirus engine, for the rest of 98% one or more antiviruses are failing in detection.   There is tests that shows aproximately only 20% of new trojans are detected by an antivirus, any of them, it does not matter but my believing is the percentage is in reality lower than 20%, maybe 1 -5 % of new trojans – zero day attacks are detected by an antivirus because speaking of unknown and newly  created [...]