“For
the ninth consecutive year, we have seen increases in virus
infections, virus disasters, and recovery costs.*”
-ICSA Labs
It
only takes one infected computer on your network to infect
all others and bring your business’s IT operations
to a grinding halt. The quicker you can identify an infected
computer, the sooner you can take measures to reduce or
mitigate an outbreak.
First
you must know how to quickly find out if your computer is
infected. But this is not as easy as it may seem. Because
there are so many different types of viruses and Internet
threats, there are also many different types of symptoms.
Some symptoms are easy to spot, while others take more digging.
To narrow it down, we identified various symptoms based
on the top 10 reported viruses for 2004 according to the
ICSA virus prevalence survey*.
Look
for the following symptoms to quickly determine if your
computer is infected:
- Unusual
system messages or fake error messages appear.
- Windows
are visible on the taskbar, but do not appear on your
desktop.
- Windows
XP SP2 firewall and Windows Update Automatic Update feature
become automatically disabled.
- People
listed in your address book tell you they’ve received
strange emails from you with attachments.
- Your
computer automatically shuts down after displaying a System
Shutdown message.
- Registry
entries have been added or removed to execute unknown
programs at startup.
- Executable
(exe) files (with varying file names) have been added
to the Windows system folder.
- Files
that contain two file extensions are added to your hard
disk (e.g., filename.zip.exe).>
*-
ISCA Labs Tenth Annual Computer Virus Prevalence Survey
(www.icsalabs.com).
